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{The hones t-to-goodness truth

If we had just removed the roof.

When we set out to create the C5 Corvette;
winning awards was never our intent. That said,
it's always nice to be recognized by automotive

(We'rt1 proud to announce that the C5 Corvette is the 1
recipient of the 1998 Motor Trend Car of the Year Award, f

cognoscenti, Our aim was to make a sports car that
handles superbly, whether a coupe or a convertible*
To achieve that end, it was critical that we didn't
chop the top off a coupe and call it a convertible.

Rather, we had to design the newest Corvette as
a convertible right from the outset, It was the
best way the only way in our minds, to make
a car with extraordinary feel and handling.

Stiffness rnd Strength We didn't want this car to
suffer from the ride setbacks other convertibles
typically have. One particular concern was how
to av oid cowl shake, a common side effect of
removing a car's roof. So, we made the structure
very rigid. The previous 48-piece frame rails
were replaced with twin seamless hydro formed
tubes. Our new hydroformod frame rail is much
more durable than a welded -up one* In fad, the
structure was tested to endure up to three life¬
times of Corvette usage* And not only is the C5

By David Hill, Cor\

. I

The C5 was designed w ithout a roof from the beginning so we

four-and-a-half times stiffer structurally than its
predecessor, it also has a lower curb weight.

The difference in rigidity is immediately notice¬
able; lateral shake is virtually gone. Ride and
handling are coupe -like.

about the C5 Corvette, after all.}

it would have been a tragedy.

ette Chief Engineer

could make a world-class sports caret's also a convertible, j
A User-Friendly Convertible Once we perfected the

structure, our next priority was to make every
millimeter of the car work for the driver, especial¬
ly in terms of comfort, spaciousness and cargo.
We wanted the car to be easy on the driver, a rare

feat in convertibles. So, the controls and functions
were placed where it would be natural to reach
for them. Entry and exit are easier because door-
sills are almost four inches lower. We've increased
the hip, shoulder and leg room. There is four times
more cargo space with the top down than with a C4.
Partly responsible for this are the run-flat tires,
which make a bulky and weight-adding spare tire
unnecessary, (The instrument panel will alert drivers
when a tire needs air.) These measures were taken
simply because we wanted customers to avoid
inconvenience wherever possible.

Power and Performance An obvious worry was
whether we would lose the true spirit of a sports
car by making it too civilized. We went to great
lengths to keep that spirit alive. The newest
Corvette has an aluminum small-block V8 that
produces 345 horsepower at 5600 rpm, 350 Ib.Tt.
of torque at 4400 rpm and, in coupe form, achieves
a 175- mph top speed.

Although it delivers more horsepower and
torque than the iron version it succeeds, the
C5 engine weighs 44 pounds less and is smaller
in size. Basically, we packed more power into a
more compact unit. We could keep the hood line
low, which would improve both aerodynamics
and driver visibility

flMmy No Compromises Perhaps the most vocal
customer opinion was that they wanted a no¬
compromise sports car; they didn't want to
sacrifice ride comfort for the sake of performance.
We found breakthrough methods to meet those
requirements. Like the composite, balsa wood-

cored floor. It minimizes vibrations for the cockpit
occupants, while being both lightweight and
strong enough to help deliver a more fatigue-
free driving experience.

The stiff new structure and revised suspension
also demonstrate how there are no take-aways in
the new convertible. By shifting the transaxle to

(Design attributes like the nostalgic waterfall make 1
the new C5 immediately recognizable as a Corvette. )

the rear, we opened up more leg room. This also
freed up room for a structural tunnel down the
middle of the car, which increased its rigidity.
That rigidity lets the suspension do its job proper¬
ly; instead of compensating for chassis flexH it
can focus on the most important things: precise
handling and a smooth ride,

TVk? Next Corvette The C5 convertible proves it is
possible to marry high performance with top-
down freedom. Simply put, this thing is incredi¬
ble. Even more than the coupe, it will far exceed
people's expectations. It even exceeded mine.

See why on the showroom floor.

Call 1 “800-950-2438
or visit www.chevrolet.com

t t e

1 a.m. 2 a.m. 3 a.m. Computing was supposed to help you at work. Not keep you at work. Where half the world spends more firm
way of looking at computing: Network computing. And that's led us to breakthroughs like our Java’" technologies. Creating an enviroi

0 IP an MtroqSHTC, rc. fit ngrtfc nsawd. Sw». Sun iha Sun logo. .tevti and The Nehw* *S Ths Compute

i/restiing with computers than getting anything out of them. Little wonder we've always had a very different
nent that’s more open. Compatible. Usable. Go home and get some sleep. THE NETWORK IS THE COMPUTER:

e fnufemarts cr rradenarhs Ot 5th Mlwray-f. terns. he. m Iha Stars m c*her BUntoW www.HJn.com

Our new 7- color printer.

Our exclusive Sewn- Color Ink
System mixes more inks to
deliver unprecedented print quality

The BfC-7000 s unique dual
printhead design has more than
1,000 nozzles for enhanced
detail, smoother color gradation
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£$ \

Our exclusive Plain-Paper .
Optimized Printing technology
(P-POP)y featuring Ink Optimized
gives true photo-quality
printing on plain paperf with
100 % water resistance.

Canon Creative 3n software
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and print brochures, stationery,
flyers, T-shirts and more.

Imagine printing to the edge of
an 8-l/2ir x IT page. While not shown here ,
our exclusive Edge-To-Edge Printing
and optional LetterPlus paper make it easy

We have something they don’t. The Canon BJC-7000 Color
Bubble JetSMprimer has arrived. Featuring our exclusive Seven-Color Ink
System, it sets a new industry standard in photo-realistic color printing.

By mixing seven inks, we’ve achieved colors unprecedented in range,
depth and richness, for image quality that matches that of a real photo¬
graph* And with Plain-Paper Optimized Printing™ (P-POP™), the BJC-7GO0

tQutput shown printed on Canon HR-101 pacwc said separate^. ttSottware designed for use with Windows® 05, and available on CD-ROM only. 'Manufacturer's suggested retail price. Dealer prices may vary. ©1997 Canon Computer

Their new 7- color printer.

There's one important
difference between our Seven-Color
Ink System and theirs: we
have a Seven-Color Ink System .

Let's just say they're lacking
in the nozzle department

Do they have Canon Creative 3 software?

> . , „ (Here's a hint: No,)

Print true photo-quality output on

plain paper. Oh, wait t that's the printer

an the other page. Never mind.

No Edge- To -Edge Printing.
But you can always fill in the
borders with colored pencils.

can print these incredible [mages on plain paper, with 100% water resis¬
tance. You won't find all of these features in any other inkjet printer. As for
the price, at $449; we'd ask you to compare it to the other printers in its

class. But thafs impossible. To get more information or to locate a
Canon dealer in your area, visit our Web site at www.ccshcanon.com
or call us at 1-800-848-4123. See what we mean’.”

Canon

Systems. Inc. Canon and 8JC are registered trademarks and Bubble Jet. Ink Optimizer, Ptiolofteaiism, Plain -Paper Optimized Printing, P-POP and ‘See what m mean" are trademarks of Canon Inc. In Canada, call 1-BOD-2B3-1 121 .

Sparky’s Pet Store

DISHES

MORE

Care to see that again?

Considering how time-consuming cross-media publishing

can be, you may not believe the speed of Adobe PageMaker*

6.5 Software. Fast. Easy, intuitive. From paper to HTML.

intxupor uit!L? AD rinks, i curved. Adotw , tb* Adube logo, Adobe PageMaker and Adobe Acrobat are festered jfademaifrs o\ Adobe Systems Incorporated,

To Acrobat PDF. To CD.lt runs across media [Ike a puppy
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199S Microsoft Corporation. AN righto reserved. Mkirosoft, ActweSync. Expedie, PowerPoint, and Widows ere either rogtsterad ijademarKs
or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation In the United States arhVor other countries.

Powered by/jgfr

"WSMwsce

What, getting real work done on the move? That’s
the promise of the latest Handheld PCs (H/PC) — powered
by isuit Wndows. CE 2.0 These H/PCs are available
now, so you can check your email, review memos, and
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It’s just like having the best of your PC with you
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And if your flight gets delayed? Review your schedule,
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To find out more about Handheld PCs powered by Microsoft
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productive?”

www.microsoftConVwrndovvsGe/tipc/ Where do you want to go today?*

Microsoft

Introducing

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The affordable IBM Netfinity 3500 dual- processor server is built to defy
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Don’t let the size
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Lotus Domino111 or
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at no additional charge

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The Netfinity 3500 s $2,365 ERP1 price tag comes with top-of-the-line
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Additional technology,
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available through
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tmm * — @

Solutions for a small planet™

e-business

Pentium*])

'Estimated reseller price bend users for single processor model 1DU. Actual resell prices may «ry, ?MHz denotes infernal clock speed of (he microprocessor
only; other factors may also ailed application performance. IBM, Metlinity, SystemXlra. the e-business logo and Solid ions for a small ptanel are trademarks
of International Business Machines. Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Microsoft. Windows and Windows NT are registered trademark
of Mksnsoft Corporation. Lgius. Domino and Domino intranet Starter Pack are trademarks of Lotus Development Corporation in the United States and/or
other countries. The Intel Inside logo, Pentium and MMX are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. ©1998 IBM Corp. AJI rights reserve!

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160

Wealth Is Overrated

And other heresies, as pronounced by Peter Drucker.

By Kevin Kelly

168

We the People

Jedermann explores the many faces of American culture.
By Rachel Lehmann-Haupt

6.03 March 1898

146

Carbon Copy

Meet the first human clone. By Richard Kadrey
Plus: G. Richard Seed claims he is doing God's work.

156

Legion of Doom

it's not just the world's most popular PC game -

for people like Sverre Kvernmo, it's a great career move.

By David McCandless

162

Hack the Magic

The exclusive underground tour of Disney World.

By Scott Kirsner

170

Breaking the Law of Gravity

Skeptics had a field day when a scientist claimed in 1996
that gravity could be negated. Now his findings are being
investigated in laboratories worldwide. By Charles Platt

152

Crop Circles

Steve Alexander rounds up mysterious patterns.

By Tom Claburn

154

Reverse-Engineering the Psyche

Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker on how the
mind really works. By Harvey Biume

a

71

79

89

99

31 RANTS & RAVES Reader feedback
37 WIREDNEWS What happened
39 PEOPLE Name-dropping
41 ELECTRIC WORD Appetizers
65 FETISH Technoiust

NEW MEDIA

HDTV rebel Barry Rebo,

the science of making babies....

THE NEW ECONOMY

China's Yellow Pages,
embracing "offshore" employees....

CRUCIAL TECH

Ant wisdom for the Web,

Telecom goes Qwest....

THE NETIZEN

Looking at Lawrence Lessig, activists
prepare for the post-CDA age....

76 Tomorrow Today What's coming

86 Updata The rest of the story

96 Hype List Deflating this month's overblown memes

lie ELECTROSPHERE

Cyber beats By David Bats tone

125 STREET CRED Consumer reviews
132 Just Outta Beta Product previews

138 Best Great stuff - tested and approved in our top-secret labs
148 Deductible Junkets Meetings of the minds
142 IdeeS Fortes Instant cultural literacy

204 NEGROPONTE

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7

A ZE R S

HE tP I NG IMPROVE

PERFORMANCE

.Ar-

Anc

THUR

DERSEN

At Arthur Andersen, our business is helping you to improve your business.
With dedicated professionals drawn from many disciplines and our
Global Best Practices5" knowledge base, we work with you to develop

THE VISION FOR YOUR COMPANY THAT WILL BEST DELIVER STELLAR RESULTS.

WE CALL THIS VISION BUSINESS PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT.

http'llwumarfhumtderseri com
©1997 Arthur Andersen. All Rights Reserved.

w

THE AWARD.

We’re looking for an idea in communications that
will change the world. Entry is open to everyone.
Buzz Aldrin, Laurie Anderson, lames Burke, Edward
de Bono, William Gibson, Tibor Kalman, Lachlan
Murdoch and Richard Saul Wurman will select the
most world-changing idea. Then we’ll change the
winner’s world. They’ll receive US $100,000, made
up of US $50,000 cash and US $50,000 worth of
communication expertise from our global network.
To discover more about our Award for Innovation in
Communication, visit http://www.saatchi-saatchi.com.
And to learn more about Saatchi & Saatchi’s vision,
please contact our worldwide Chief Executive Officer,
Kevin Roberts, on e-mail: kroberts@saatchiny.com.

Editor in Chief: Katrina Heron

Executive Editor: Kevin Kelly

Creative Directors: John Plunkett and Barbara Kuhr

Managing Editor: Martha Baer
Senior Editors: Peter Leyden. Spencer Reiss
Associate Features Editor- Jackie Reunion
Editorial Production Director William 0 Goggins
Senior Associate Editor: Amy Johns

Associate Editors: Mark Frauenfelder.Todd La ppin. Jessie Scanlon. Brad Wieners

Senior Section Editor: Kristine Kern

Section Editors: Jesse Freund, Bob Parks

Senior Research Editor: Michael Behar

Research Associates: Heidi Kriz, Patricia Krueger

Copy Editors: Steve Mo liman, Mark Nlchol, Anne Speed ie

Editorial Assistants: Catharine Lo.Ted Roberts

Interns: Jennifer Hlllner {Research}, Carrie Chang (Edit)

Contributing Editors: Chip Bayers, David S, Bennahum (New York}, Cotin Berry
(Music), Gareth Branwyn, John Browning (Europe). Jeff Greenwald, Jon Katz
(Media), Oliver Morton {Science}, David Pescavilz, Steve G. Steinberg (Technology],
Rogier van Bakel

Contributing Writers: John Perry Barlow. Thomas Bass, Stewart Brand, Po Bronson.
Jon Carroll, Douglas CoupFand, David Diamond, Esther Dysonjoe Flower,

SEmson Garfinkel, Masha Gessen, William Gibson, George Gilder, Mike Godwin,
Fred Hapgood, Bob Johnstone, Jaron Lanier, Andrew Leonard, Jacques Leslie,
Steven Levy, Pamela McCord uck, Paula Parish Phil Patton, Charles Plate
Joshua Quittner, Rudy Rucker, Paul Saffo, Michael Schrage, Evan L Schwartz,
Peter Schwartz, John Shirley, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Gary Wolf
Senior Columnist: Nicholas Negroponte

Design Director: Thomas Schneider

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y

"Violence is a quest for
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E

Publisher: Dana Lyon

Vice President and Associate Publisher: Drew Schutte

Email: Advertising: adVertrsrng@w/re</. corn Wired Market: fnorker&wired.cQm

Sam Francisco

Advertising Director:

Moira McDonald 4- 1 (4 15)276 4903
West Coast Account Managers:

John Fitzgerald (415) 276 4907

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San Francisco, CA 941 07- 1B1 5

Los Angeles

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Venice, CA 90291

New York

Vice President, Sales:

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Advertising Director:

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Sales Development Manager:

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El izabeth Bentley +1(212)8220233
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Christian Frerecks +1(212)822 0213
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Sara Stein +1 (212)822 0212

Receptor NY: Ben Jurln

16 West 19th St., 11th Floor

New York, NY 1 0011
+1 (212)822 0200

Chicago

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325 W. Huron St . Suite 713

Chicago, IL 606 10
+1 (312) 640 5202

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3221 W, Big Beaver Rd„ Suite 309

Troy, Ml 48034
+ 1 (810)816 9300

Boston

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36 Newbury St , 4th Floor

Boston, MA 02116
+1 (617) 859 3636

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11085 Amberton Crossing

Duluth, GA 30155
+ 1 (770) 232 0555

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5000 Quorum Dr.r Suite 545

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+ 1 (972) 960 2889

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Via G. 0 mboni 1

201 29 Mliano, Italia
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+1 (415) 276 5202

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+1 (415) 276 8440

Director of Media Relations: Shelley Tatum +1 (415) 276 5162

Advertising Marketing Director: £ I tzabeth MnrEey
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Research Manager: Jacquelyn Johnstone
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Sales Associates: Ellse Barclay, Sharon Beatty, Mary Bideaux, Holly Deveril,

Anne Dugan, Rebecca Farrell, Lauren Getstejyl Hardenbergh, Paige Meginley,

Tara Mitchell Marni Molak

Senior Vice President and General Manager: Todd Sotkiewicz
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Circulation Director: Catherine Huchtlng
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Fulfillment Mgr.: Peter Corbett
Customer Serv. Mgr. : Kim Thornton
Circ. Promotions: Christina Ganjel
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Databases: Brad Bulger
Single Copy Sales: George Clark
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Trad em at ks : Car I a Ba rros Facilities M a nager; Bart Higgins

International: MegumE ikeda Mai Iroom: Diana Sullivan

Rights, Reprints: Cheryl Peregrine Receptor SF: Lisa Portillo

Controller: Spend Matthews
Senior Accountant: Doug Mason
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Mitchell

A/P Manager: Indra Lowenstein
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Accounting Assistant: Amy Jensen

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□r check drawn cm a US bank.

Reprints: email rep rin Ts Qwiredca m.

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R A M & R Jv eW

Digital Cynic

So, 95 percent of the superconnected worship free
markets, while only 59 percent believe In democracy.
Is it some epiphany that employed, economically
ascendant people should believe in free markets
more than in democracy? Could it be that the uncon¬
nected - the poor, uneducated, economically stag¬
nated - believe less in markets and democracy not
because they are less concerned citizens, but because
they have been screwed by both?

The connected folks are savvy about the work¬
ings of our economy: 50 percent believe that who
you know is more Important in getting ahead than
what you know. The unconnected ding to the pro¬
paganda that what you know counts. What does
It say about opportunity in the US that the class
universally viewed as the final product of a perfect
meritocracy doesn't really believe that merit is what
got them there?

Clearly, the connected folks suspect that our
democracy may actually be a sham. They believe
that Bill Gates and Bill Clinton have an almost equal
impact on the US .The unconnected cling to the
ludicrous myth that a democratically elected presi¬
dent has more Influence on the country than an
unelected, undemocratic, monopoly-building bil¬
lionaire. Who is the cynic, and who is the citizen?
David Maizenberg
david@mai7enberg.com

Survey Says

I cringe whenever unsupported conclusions are drawn from poorly
designed surveys. The Digital Citizen survey (Wired 5,12, page 68}
is an unfortunate example of this malady.

Designed to measure levels of digitarconnectednessP"the survey
in fact measures levels of affluence, it should come as no surprise
that Individuals with enough money to afford a laptop, a cell phone,
a beeper, and a home computer are also likely to believe in democracy,
feel In control of change, and be optimistic about their future, Duh:
the system works for them. Why would they feel any other way?
Wired would have gotten the same result if the researchers had com¬
pared the attitudes of those who drive a Lexus to
work with the attitudes of those who take the bus,
Yet Jon Katz goes on to fabricate a cause-and-
effect relationship that is completely unsupported
by the study/'Clearly, there is now evidence that
technology promotes democracy, citizenship, knowl¬
edge, literacy, and community, " Katz writes. This
is pure conjecture. In fact, the survey identifies a
correlation only; It does not determine cause and
effect in any direction.

Lars Kongshem
norge@access.digex.net

Pollster Frank Luntz's secondary
analyses of the Wired/A ierrill
Lynch Forum Digital Citizen Survey
results reveal that two people of
similar age , race , education, and
income are likely to have different
views about politics and society if
one is connected and the other is
not (Full survey results at www
.hotwired.eom/special/citlzen/J.

Attention Deficiency

What a frightening world this would be if attention became our cur¬
rency, for attention Is the currency of children, who scream at the top
of their lungs until some haggard adult appeases their need for food,
affection, et cetera (Wired 5.12, page 182),

By motivating attention-getting behavior that disrupts society, the
attention economy could have warped results. Face it, who gets the

most attention? Charles Manson
pops to mind. Of course, not all
those rich in attention are crimi¬
nally insane. There's Madonna,
jerry Seinfeld, and Michael Jor¬
dan. You can't criticize these
people for what they do. But
what about the guy who actually
works for a living - the anony¬
mous Joe who fixes the pipes
when they burst or the gal who
puts the widget on the doohickey
to make a microchip? Where will
they fit in this new economy?
Adam Schair

juris50@dassic,msn,com

Which Came First?

Jon Katz's "The Digital Citizen" makes it dear that
many people regard communications technology
as the driving force behind social and economic
change. However, in a modern capitalist society,
technology is a tool to help us adapt to and manage
change in an increasingly competitive world - it Is
not some mysterious driving force behind change.
Dave Amis

kam76@dial.pipex.com

Get Real

"Attention Shoppers!" has some good points, but
Michael Goldhaber's definition of attention as
a "limited resource" that could completely replace
money Is thoughtless. Economies have always revolved around phy¬
sical things - land, money, or some other tangible good that could
be counted and sorted. Goldhaber's currencies of the future are meta¬
physical resources: attention, intelligence, desire, hate. While meta¬
physical resources can indirectly affect physical economics - think
of brand names - they could never become the standard of currency
in a physical world
Kevin Hitl

deadJock@ix.netcom.com

WIRED MARCH 1098

R A N T S & * Iv eW

journey into outer space.

Jeff Foust

jeff@spaceviews.com

Man Versus Machine

While one can argue that manned programs like the space shuttle and the International
Space Station are expensive and wasteful ("Lost in Space/' Wired 5.12, page 226), it is
a leap of logic to thus assume, as Piers Bizony does, that sending humans into space
is unnecessary and undesirable.

Bizony falls into the old "humans versus robots" argument that has ripped through
science communities for decades. This should not bean either/or proposition Jhe best
way to study the solar system, and to search for evidence of past or present life on
worlds like Mars and Europa, is through a combination of preliminary robotic missions
and intensive follow-up studies by the most advanced, most knowledgeable, most
innovative research devices yet known; humans. As development of reusable launch
vehicles makes access to space less expensive, the same inner drive that led us across
land and sea will compel us to

Magic Kingdom

Piers Bizony missed the most important aspect of
the great space debate: the involvement of private
enterprise Jhe satellite- based telecom industry gen¬
erates billions of dollars annually and provides thou¬
sands of jobs. NASA and JPL, by comparison, amount
to chump change .The main problem with the Inter¬
national Space Station is not its lack of a mission
-Jo see how people can live and
work in space" - but its choice of
partners. Forget Europe, Japan,
and especially Russia. Go with
Walt Disney. Disney World may
be overhyped and expensive, but
it still draws millions of people
from around the world. Let's make
the ISS the Epcot in space.

Bill Stuckey

bstuckey@bellsouth.net

Fighting the Virus

As a Bulgarian, I was extremely
interested to hear David 5. Ben-
nah urn's requiem of darkness
("Heart of Darkness," Wired 5,1 1 ,
page 226). The chorus of cyber
pirates reaches all possible notes
of this Vmso-Apocalypse Now.
The"evil empire" is dead Jong
live the "virus empire"!

Sadly, the article demonizes
thousands of talented Bulgarian
programmers, many of whom
work in top US companies and
most of whom continue to fight
the current economic crisis in
Bulgaria - not with viruses,
but with outstanding software
creativity.

Arthur Kordon
kordon@sat.net

Innocent Little Angels

In "Virtual Danger" [Wired 5.11, page 118), 1 found
a gem of a sentence: "Children continue to serve
as pawns in America's culture wars," It is so true!

No one consulted us about the laws designed to protect us. Why?
Because those laws are really designed for the parents, ! mean, seri¬
ously, how will we be permanently scarred by porn? The Communica¬
tions Decency Act, the Platform for Internet Content Selection, and the
Child Pornography Prevention Act serve the interests of parents who
want to believe that their children are innocent little angels, Uh-oh,

I better send this - here comes my mom,

Sam

bovine_duck jv@email.msn.com

Portrait of the Artist as an Artist

Steven Holtzman's comments in "The Artist of the
Future Is a Technologist" {Wired 5.12, page 256)
are the uneducated babble of an effete snob who
wouldn't know art if it bit him in the ass. Art is only
as good as the entity that creates it. The computer
is just a new kind of paintbrush. It will always take
true creative genius to produce great art, regard¬
less of the medium Jo say that Jhe future will not
be dominated by any of these rare individuals" is
no more than a tired '90s retread of the '60s cry
"Power to the People!"

Mahlon F. Craft
kinukoyc@pcnet.com

Get Wired. Online.

www.wired.com
Get breaking news and insiders'
insights on the digital world,
reported up to the minute.

(miHEQNEWS

www.hotwired.com
immme yourself in the Webs latest
tech, business, arts, and issues.

H©T© | ©E©

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Find it with HotBot search services,
offering the Web's best-rated search
engine - the largest, freshest data¬
base for the most accurate results.

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top news sites automatically around
the dock, tracking updates on the
topics you choose.

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Send your Rants & Raves to:

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Editorial guidelines:
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Editorial correspondence:
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Undo

Bug Bug: Patti Maes worked with Yezdi Lashkarl, not Max Metral, programming Firefly's
agents to learn from each other (Tattle/' Wired 5.12, page 236) . ■ Renamed: Empirical
Media (Tattle," Wired 5.1 2r page 236) became WiseWire Corporation during the first
quarter of 1997, ■ Overeager Spellchecker: Two protons that collide in an accelerator
("The Future Ruins of the Nuclear Age," Wired 5,12, page 240) are transformed into
muons.® Horse Trade Jito Pontecorvo ("The Future Ruins of the Nuclear Age," Wired
5. 12, page 240} is holding the lead on the far right in the photograph on page 254.

■ Price Fix: The Night Mariner 260 [Wired Tools, Wired 5.12) sells for US$2,495.® Illusive
IllusionJhe term illusionary attention ("Attention Shoppers!" Wired 5.12, page 182)
should read illusory attention.

WIRED MARCH 1998

Digital MSMCSf

Imagine That. On a Floppy.™

SHOOT!

IQx optical zoom lens * Up to 500 shots per battery charge* • 5 exposure settings ■ 4 in-camera special effects

STORE!

Standard 3.5" floppy disk * No wires, cables or drivers * Up to 40 images per floppy ■ Universal JPEG file format

Database Files

Spreadsheets

Word Processing Documents Page Layout Documents

SHOW!

Add images with ease * 640 x 480 24 bit VGA color ■ Mac/Windows compatible

* continuous recording st lO-second intervals with ffasti off,

O 1998 Sony Etectronics Inc. AH rights reserved. Sony. Mavloa.
Imagine THiat. On a Floppy- and Shoot I Store’ Show’
are trademarks of Sony.

WWW, Sony . com/m&vica

SONY.

Industry

Imagine. A high-end workstation that can fie easily integrated into your existing Windows NT® or mixed
environment. That’s no fantasy, that’s the IBM InlelliStation? « You can install it in a snap. And thanks
to industry- leading manageability features including IBM Wake on LAN** and LANClient Control Manager,
you can set up and configure your system, distribute software images, conduct remote diagnostics and provide
support, all over the LAN from one central location. Saving time and money. * InlelliStation gives your users
both top-of-the-Iine graphics and PC functionality. Witfi Windows NT versions of the industry’s most advanced
applications, users can execute 2D and 3D technical graphics. And simultaneously on the same screen, they can write
letters, semi e-mail and access the Internet, sharing their ideas over your LAN, throughout the country and the world
• So find out more about the IBM InlelliStation, the powerful new workstation that's taking the industry by storm.

Find out why nothing gets in the way of a good idea*

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Nothing gets in the way of a good idea,

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Accessible capacity may be less. IBM. Intelii Station and Solutions for a small planet are trademarks or registered iractemarks of International Business Machines Corporation The
Intel Inside logo and Pentium are registered trademarks of Intel Coip. Microsoft and Windows NT are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Other company, product and
service names may be trademarks or service marks of others PCs referenced In this ad ship with an operating system. © 19*93 IBM Gorp. All rights reserved.

pentium»]f

Having a Web site is like having

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<tt 1997 UUNET TecJjnologjes. In
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HE INTERNET AT WORK

Unfortunately,

first impressions are often the only
chance you get The same is true for your Web
site. When someone clicks on it, you need to grab their
attention. And you need to do it quickly. Because if yoursite's
performance or functionality isn't up to the job, your customers
are going to lose interest. And that's no way to get a second date.
That's why UUNET® developed the most comprehensive Web hosting
services in the industry. Services with the performance to minimi® customer
frustration and the application tools to help you create a dynamic, high-
interest site. When you host with us. your site resides in a bandwidth-rich
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^HiH=Elview*

What happened, iy Dan Brekke

Density Destiny

IBM engineers in Silicon Valley
doubled their previous record
for magnetic storage media,
packing 116 billion bits of data
(725,000 typed, double-spaced
pages) per square inch of disk
surface. The dense drives will
come to market within four years.
In the process, the price of 1 meg
of disk memory will shrink to
3 cents (compared with US$11.54
in 1988), Prediction; Bloatware
will inflate as never before to fill
up the cheap memory.

Boom Tames
Continuing economic turbu¬
lence in Southeast Asia raised
fears that the global boom could
flatten into a dead thud Worst-
case scenario: China and Japan
veer Into the Pacific Rim pileup,
and slow the global economy.
Less-drastic vision: Tech sectors
hit the brakes as Asian customers
run out of cash. Reality; The ques¬
tion isn't whether, but when and
how deeply the effects will be
felt outside the region.

Tiananfnefi.gov

Chinese officials concluded that
although the Internet can be a
great force for modernization,
the information it carries can
damage the state, So the govern¬
ment introduced rules to control
content and punish anyone whq_
uses the Net to spread unortho¬
dox views. It was Deng Xiaoping
all over again: encourage eco¬
nomic freedoms while maintain¬
ing rigid political control. But will
the tactic succeed on the Net?

The real test comes only when
China's tiny Net population
expands. The current tally is
a mere 250,000.

Our Censored Libraries

Libraries across the country
witnessed the first shots in a
landmark legal battle. Citizens
in Loudoun County, Virginia,
challenged the growing use
of Net-filtering tools by public
institutions. The group, Main¬
stream Loudoun, argued that
library officials in the county
outside Washington, DC, tram¬
pled the First Amendment by
requiring patrons to use censor-
ware and Net terminals to be
placed where staff can see them.

Tim Berners-Lee: the PICS devil?

Taming the Net

After the World Wide Web Con¬
sortium refined its Platform for
Internet Content Selection,

the intended standard for rating
and filtering sites, the Global
Internet Liberty Campaign
launched a free -speech attack,
accusing the W3C of doing the
devil's work by helping dictators
and censors everywhere muzzle
netizens.The response from
W3Cs Hm Berners-Lee: Our tech¬
nology is good - but rights
groups should remain vigilant.

Recognized

Time's Man of the Year; Andy
Grove, because the mag's editors
were turned on by his escape-
from-Budapest story, (Though
we wonder why, as the most
powerful chief outside Redmond,
he's worth only $350 million.)
National Medal of Technology;
Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn,
fot'creating and sustaining
development of Internet proto¬
cols and continuing to provide
leadership in the emerging
i n d u stry of i nter n etwo r ki n g , "
and Ray Dolby, for his work
developing sound -recording
and playback technology.

TeleMelodrama

Ruling in favor of SBC Commu¬
nications Inc, a federal judge
in Wichita Fa I Is, Texas, declared
the Tetecom Act of '96 unconsti¬
tutional because it makes it too
hard for SBC and sister Baby
Bells to compete in the long
distance market. The resulting
salvo of appeals is likely to sink
the ruling. But the episode will
also speed up a congressional
review of the much-litigated law,

Wiring Shuffle

The Telecom Act ordered the
Federal Communications Com¬
mission to set up a fund to get
schools, libraries, and public-
health clinks online .The FCC, in
turn, ordered phone companies
to subsidize the project. When
the telcos rebelled, the FCC low¬
ered the subsidy by more than
30 percent. A temporary peace.

Apple; Back in BEack

After five quarters of punishing,
Stalingrad-scale losses, Apple
CEO-not Steve Jobs delivered an
astonishing financial report. In
the fourth quarter of 1997, the
Mac company tallied profits
for the first time since Bob Dole
was a contender. The $47 million
didn't change the worfd.But it
did give Jobs a dash of cred.

Apple CEO-not Steve Jobs :

©o

You can read Wired News daily at

www.wired.com

Netscape: Seeing Red

The webware shop's stock fell
to $18 - a record low - after the
company announced a fourth-
quarter '97 loss of $85 million,
and the staff layoffs began. PR
Spin One: The numbers reflected
a momentary dip as the firm
moves from the browser trade
to the corporate-enterprise
business. PR Spin Two; Bill Gates's
free -internet Explorer strategy
undercut Netscape's sales.
Reality: Netscape will have to
give away its $49.99 browsers
to keep market share.

Microsoftening?

Microsoft declared that the
only way to comply with Judge
Thomas Penfield Jackson's order
to offer a version of Windows 95
sans the Internet Explorer
browser was to supply defec¬
tive software. After being chas¬
tised by the judge, however, the
software superpower allowed
that its behavior might have
been strident And Microsoft's
lawyers tried to assume a more
polite tone of voice even as
they continued to whine about
the court-appointed special
master, Lawrence Lessig, (See

The Special Master," page 99.) _

But Judge Jackson called the
polite brief ''defamatory, "and
dismissed the company's filing.

S?

WIRED MARCH 1998

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IMAGES- FONG: J, BUTLER: WILSON: SCOTT HAtfBEN

The Prodigal Guy

The Mac's prodigal evangelist - now on teave

writing Rates for Revolutionaries - is due to return to Apple this
summer. But his return is looking less than likely. "Who in this
business knows where they'll be in six months?" Kawasaki jokes
of his plans. But his new venture, garagexom, is no joke. Kawa¬
saki won't verify that the business will be a sort of venture capital
network for non-VCs, but insiders familiar with his plans say the
company will match angel investors with start-ups looking for
the seed capital needed to get a great idea out of the garage.

Air Thresh

So Dennis Fong - aka Thresh - went pro.The 21 -year-old videogame
star from Berkeley, California, is competing in the rookie season of the
Professional Gamers' League, Knowing that winning first prize in the PGL
Quake season will earn him only US$7,500, the young star is looking to
endorsements for the big money. Several major equipment manufac¬
turers have approached Thresh with deals starting in the low five figures.
The joystick kid is even negotiating with one company about making
a custom mouse and other Thresh products. But as his agent Peter Kim
stresses/ Dermis Is very, very picky about what he endorses."

When IBM bought Lotus Corporation for $3.5 billion in 1995, it was
really buying Lotus Notes - and , its creator. Which Is to

say that you should pay attention to Ozzie and his new start-up,
Rhythm ix* Qzzie isn't talking specifics about the company's first
product, except to say that the new software focuses on the
same goal as Notes and Netscape - communication and collab¬
oration - but with a different spin. And Qzzie has a luxury few
software geniuses have even the second time around: a per¬
sonal fortune of $84 million that enables him to be the majority
investor. As Ozzie's Rhythmix grows, take note.

The Unziff

Chris Anderson, the man behind the spring relaunch of The
Net , says the repositioned mag (edited by former Wired features
editor Jim Daly) will target "a business audience that under¬
stands the internet explosion "The aspiring new media mogul
from Britain also invested recently in the webzine feed. Ander¬
son's vision is best summed up by a billboard for his Imagine
Publishing company that proclaims "www.notziff.com. "Though
a man of grand ambitions might want to aim even higher.

A Gathering Storm

Current gaming powerhouses "are run by people completely
alienated from the industry and its subculture, "says Mike Wilson,
of ton Storm and id Software fame. The Wilson-organized Gath¬
ering of Developers aims to change that. His new company -
a consortium of six big-name publishers - will create titles too
alternative for mass appeal, real gamers' games that might make
the suits in the marketing department uneasy. Wilson's gathering
will release its first four titles this year.

By Chip Bayers

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IMAGE; L05 ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY

t Alamos National Labo¬
ratory researchers Kendall
Hollis and Richard Castro
do materials science, Tom
Bollinger does sculpture.
Their uniikely partnership
grew out of the US govern¬
ment's technology-transfer
program, which encourages
federally funded laboratories
to develop commercial appli¬
cations for their technologies
and make them available
to local interests. In New
Mexico, that means artists.

So early this year Hollis and
Castro, who admits he "can't
even draw a do g," contacted

Bollinger, then head of a
nearby foundry. Working
together, the three trans¬
formed a nuclear weapons
storage technology into art.

The technique uses an elec¬
trical charge to melt metal
wires and then spray the
molten liquid onto an object,
creating a corrosion-resistant
polished surface. The process
is more flexible than conven¬
tional casting methods;
different metals - or any
material with a melting point

- can be blended seamlessly,
and the coating can be spread
as thin as a few thousandths
of an inch.

Call it the National Security
Endowment for the Arts.

- Jessie Scanlon

I/O

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n East London on the Greenwich
prime meridian, 12 yellow steel
masts soar 328 feet above the hori¬
zon, the first signs of the Millennium
Dome* Designed by Pompidou Centre
architect Richard Rogers, the £40
million (US$65 million) dome will
be the centerpiece of the Millennium
Experience, Britain's fin-de-siede
celebration.

It will also be the only lasting
element: long after the futuristic
exhibits close December 31, 2000, #
the structure will dominate this
wasteland-by-the-Thames. Measur¬
ing 164 feet in height, 350 yards In
diameter, and covering the 20 acres
now cluttered with diggers and
cranes, the dome will he the largest

I in the world when it is completed in
late 1 998. - Jessie Scanlon

tat M

TIRED

Retin-A
Sarin
WAV files

Online communities

nest

WebTV box
Nintendo 64
Tamagotchi
Kai Tak
Think tanks

WIRED

Telomerase
Pokemon
MIDI over the Net
Online auctions
Echoes

Digital cable box
Project X
PostPet
Chek Lap Kok
Do tanks

The little ticktock of the millen¬
nial dock will make US$115
billion for a crowd of clever pro¬
grammers, Y2K business consul¬
tants, and, of course, lawyers,
according to International Data
Corporation. Here's a sample
of who's cashing in on the
dreaded Year 2000 Problem.

- Jennifer HUIner

Steven Hock
TiH Attorney at law
Affixation Thelen, Marrin,
Johnson & Bridges

$500,000 to $2 million
Hock earns his millennial
millions defending computer
companies whose products
suffer from the Y2K bug. This
year. Hock and his 28- lawyer
team will represent Software
Business Technologies in a
$50 million class-action suit
(the first major Y2K case to hit
the courts), as well as three
similar actions.

Jack O'Bryan

Programmer/data
systems consultant

Levi Strauss & Co,
$120,000 to $250,000
O'Bryan spends an average of
50 hours a week eyeballing
code - miles of It - scanning
for dates used in calculations
or sequencing and then
rewriting the code,

Cynthia Warner

Acting director of the
Strategic Information Tech¬
nology Analysis Division
US Government
Office of information
Technology, General
Services Administration

$77,000 to $101 ,000
Warner is Uncle Sam's Y2K
official, responsible for
evaluating the Y2K effect on
all federal agencies and
hounding them to comply
with official Y2K policy. She is
also responsible for steering
the federal Y2K logo through
the US Patent Office,

The Next Generation

Big Bird fans have something big to took
forward to: Between the Lions . The show
is the first product of Sirius Thinking Ltd,,
an educational programming company
founded in 1994 by ex- Apple CEO John
Seulley (above), along with Christopher
Cerf, Michael Frith, and Norman Stiles -
a creative trio whose combined resume
includes Sesame Street and Jim Henson
Productions,

Like the classic children's show, Between
the Lions offers the nuts and holts of read
ing and phonics in the form of fantastical
stories and animal characters. Unlike Sesame
Street , however, the Sirius production uses
sophisticated live action, animation, and
3-D rendering technologies and will exist
in multiple media. Theo (above left), Cleo,
and Click the Mouse will debut on TV in
1999 - and then move on to the Web, books,
and, as Seulley promises, "any media that
words can be printed on.* - Jessie Scanlon

06

WIRED MARCH 1 9 9 B

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dence fiction writer Marc Laidfaw
has finally gotten a life, or at least
half of one. Now you too can get a
Half-Life when his first computer
game is released in April. As Laid law
fells it, the title 'is going to do the
stuff I always wanted games to do."
Half-Life's finely rendered monsters
may be brutish, but they're not dumb:
Al developed by Valve, a Seattle game
company, equips them with pack
behavior, threat assessment, and -
unlike most gorefest goons - a dis¬
inclination toward suicide attacks.

For laidlaw, creating an adventure
set in a demilitarized missile base
invaded by extradimensional aliens
sure beats toiling as a legal secretary,
a job he had for 10 years before land¬
ing at Valve. For gamers, entering
a world written by a master story¬
teller makes it that much more fun
to blow away the bad guys.

- Mark Frauenfelder

IMAGE: Pl-EflRE-VWES GO Air EC

ow those snap-together
colored bricks of childhood
yore can do even more.
Assemble the appropriate
wickets, wheels, pulleys,
pumps, clamps, gears, and
hinges, turn it on - and,
thanks to the Robotics Inven¬
tion System, your Legobots
come to life.

This new generation of
smart Legos is the result of a
1 0-year collaboration between
the Danish toymaker and
researchers at the MIT Media
Lab. Each kit includes a pro¬
grammable brick that serves
as a rugged, battery-powered
Lego brain. Using a PC and
a simple programming lan¬
guage (a version of Seymour
Papert's Logo), kids build their
own Robotics programs by
linking a chain of iconic com¬
mands in a drag-and-drop
interface, and then download
the instructions to the brick
via infrared ports. Here's how
the Legobot building blocks
stack up. - Michael Behar

The standard
Robotics kit includes:

RCX Brick

The RCX brick has an 8-bit
processor and memory
for five programs, each
capable of executing nine
tasks simultaneously.

light Sensor

Ones the light stay on
when the refrigerator
door shuts? Plug a light
sensor into one of jflgM
the brick's three
input ports, build
a body and some arms and
legs, stick it in the fridge,
and you'll have an answer.
Or at least the Legobot will,

Touch Sensor

Touch sensors prevent the
robots from falling off tables
or thrusting themselves
repeatedly into corners.

With a few basic commands,
a bat can be instructed to
clutch an empty beer can
in its daws and drop it into
a nearby recycle bin.

Motor Ports

Three control ports can be
programmed separately to
switch a motor on and off or
vary speeds. Combine a series
of gears and you've got a
So/ou rner-l ike vehicle with
enough torque to maneuver

over a phone book.

Infrared Ports

Two infrared ports are
included: one on the brick
itself and one for your PC,
Future robots will be able to
talk to each other, mimicking
movements or working
together on preassigned
tasks.

Hackers

Jr J

Mutiny on the 101. It started with a whisper.
The crew was unhappy. The cookie-cutter
family sedan was the cause. For years they
searched the horizon fora car that spoke to
their hearts and souls, but found nothing.
Then, they saw it. The new Volkswagen Passat.
Starting at only $20,750,* they felt it stood for
the same things they did. The braver ones
jumped ship first. More were sure to follow.

Live large. The New Passat.

Drivers wanted!^)

"base MSftP. Pries sxdudes taxes, regiilrtit'Oii, JirOTSpfjrlntlbn and dede^drergei [ Nearer sots aduat pree. 5-vatve engine tehd^K>bc|)', Traction control Antdbek
fjmfees. Ana jus! about power aworylViing bii. to rro. baby 1-000 DRIVE VW www.^om. Always *-~\i ^edbeih. fa «997 Vt iks ■. . je

I E TOP 0

Downloads from the Internet Underground Music Archive

Song Title

Artist

Genre

Downloads

1. ''Cow Lion 5 Clowned Me"

Kaka Pussy

Spoken word/ex peri mental

2,224

2. "Stop Your Push in rr

Pole Juju

World beat

1,420

3. "Forgotten'

Blue Noise Electric

Dance/techno

794

4. "Yum Yum"

1 Percent Hangout

flap /hip hop

749

5. Tve Been Here Before"

Kelly Luttrell

Folk/pop

749

o. "One World r

Gregory Abbott

Blues/pop

716

7, "Perfect Strangers"

Tonya Rae

Country

655

a. "Tom Song"

30 Foot Whipper

ColEege/indie/hard rock

530

9. "Watching the Young"

23 Futurists

Amblent/eJectronk

517

io. "Alien Bliss"

Allen Bliss

Pop/rock/jazz

449

Mote: As of November 1997, all artists on this list were on signed. These figures are based
on the number of people clicking on a link for the fuEMength version of a particular song In
November 1997, Source: Internet Underground Music Archive (www.iumaxom/k compiled by
Howard Wen. - Gareth Branwyn

n the market for a Stradivari or an Amati? Before you
buy a US$1 million fiddle, talk to Steve Sirr, a Minneapolis
radiologist who makes CAT scans of rare violins and other
bowed instruments. These radiograms reveal details of
an instrument's inner surfaces and imperfections - such
as wormholes, glue lines, and other structural defects - all
of which could affect sound quality and estimated value.
"It was fortuitous," says Sirr, himself an amateur bow
scraper. "One day, after I scanned a patient, I looked over
and saw my violin on the table and thought/] wonder
what that would look like?'" Considering the hefty price
of a Strad, Sirr's scans are a great insurance policy.

- Colin Berry

JARGON

WATCH

Jithead

An international trans¬
portation term used to
describe people who
order goods on a "just in
time" basis and then freak
out when told that they
didn't order early enough.
"That jithead should
have placed his order
a month ago."

Diaper Change

One of several daily visits
by a tech-support person
to the desk of a particu¬
larly cranky, lazy, or tech¬
nically incompetent user.
"Sorry I was late, but I had
to do a diaper change
down in Accounting/

Lapjatking

The increasingly common
practice, especially in
airports, of stealing unat¬
tended laptop computers.

lovejob

Graphics service bureau
slang for a file that an
art director obsessively
wants output in every
possible variation /Yeah,

I know we're ripping it
to the Iris proofer for the

ninth time. This one's
a lovejob."

Multislacking

When an employee has
two browser windows
open, a nonwork-related
site on top of a produc¬
tive one, and quickly
clicks on the legitimate
site whenever the boss
is nearby.

Packet- centric

A growing focus in the
telecom industry away
from voice-dominant
(circuit-centric) networks
and toward IP packet net¬
works as the future deliv¬
ery system for combined
data and telephony.

Up orlhe camouflage hunting
hat to Judith Bookbinder Warren 5,
Levine, and David Lipton.

- Gorefb Branwyn
Ejargon@hvired.CG ml

WIRED MARCH 1998

02

IMAGES: STEVEN SIRS. UD

Meet Josh. He makes regular
deliveries to Austin Acres. Once a
small town garden supply company.

Mow a worldwide lawn equipment
manufacturer that needs a big-time
place to put all its stuff. That's why
the Zip® drive and genuine 100 HB
Zip disks are perfect for Austin Acres
and growing businesses like yours.
They give you the freedom to carry
stuff between the office, home,
school, greenhouse, or
wherever life takes
you. Each Zip disk
holds as much as 70
fLoppies. It's like having your own
digital briefcase with more than
enough room to store multimedia
presentations, Internet downloads,
months' worth of e-mails from your
server, business records, and even
pink flamingo orders. And with
over 10 million drives out there, it's
easy to see why people are getting
carried away with the Zip drive.

Standard 1DOMB Zip disks far
as low as $12.95 each when
purchased in 10-packs.

COURIER

Here's Carol, the lead engineer
behind some of the most
innovative weed- whacking devices
around. She Looks like a happy
camper* Well, she is, because she
uses a 3az® drive. With over a
million drives out there, lots of
people are using the Jaz drive to
help their businesses grow. The Jaz
drive is perfect for storage-intense
users and will definitely create more
elbow room around the office. It's
portable too— so you can take your
stuff anywhere. With Jaz 1GB drives
and cartridges, and the upcoming
2GB* drive, youTl have tons
of room to store huge graphics,
customer database files, or back
up your entire hard drive. Along
with the help of the
new 8uz Multimedia
Producer™ you'll be
able to edit video and

give knock-out multimedia
presentations. Stretch out,
you've got room.

1GB Jaz cartridges start as low
as SS9.95 when purchased
in 3-packs,

Whoa, hold or there. This is
George, head security guard.

He makes sure everything is
secure. But when it comes to
securing your data, nothing works
better than a Ditto MaxtM drive*
It's Like insurance for a LI the
important business stuff on your
computer. The Ditto Max backup
solution, available with 3GBr 5GBH
and 7GB compressed* capacity
cartridges, is a heavyweight
equipped to protect today's high-
capacity hard drives. Whether
they're year-end financial reports,
tax records, top-secret formulas
for greener lawns, or customer
databases — Ditto Max drive
protection is sure to make you
feel nice and safe. And you'll feel
even safer knowing it's from
Iomega, the leader in personal
storage solutions. So get a
Ditto Max drive because, as you
know, accidents can happen.

Not just on the lawn.

The Ditto Max drive handLes
3GB, 5GB, and 7GB compressed*
capacity cartridges.

SECURITY

Actual size.

Say helLo to Susan. She's a people
person. As the head of Corporate
PR, she is always on the road,
bringing people together From
parties to conventions to share-
holder meetings, she needs a cool
way to take her stuff wherever she
goes. Coming later this year for
people on the go, there's Clik!™ the
new 40MB match book -size solution
for portable digital devices. Susan
could use Clik! disks as a "digital
roll of film" to transfer the photos
of the annual party onto her sub¬
notebook and post them on the
intranet, bringing her glohaL
company closer together. Clik! disks
will allow portable devices like
digital cameras, handheLd PCs,
PDAs, printers, and projection
systems to truly interact, doing
more and sharing more with each
other. And with OEM support
co nti n ually g ro wi n g , lots of h a n d -
held devices will have CLik! drives
built right in. Just think, with Clik!
products, you could party on into
the next millennium.

Clik! disks: 40MB erf space
for under ten bucks.

E L A T I 0 N S

The Iomega Zip' drive.
The Capacity To Do More;'1

Portability

100 MB Zip disks are removable and the
drive is portable. So you can shuttle
your work stuff home, to the airport, to
a client, and ultimately, back to work.

Organization and Expansion

Take control of your personal and
business affairs with a Zip drive. Not
only will you look good, but its an
inexpensive alternative to hard drive
expansion. Use one disk for your yearly
financial spreadsheets and forecasts,
and another for hefty multimedia
presentations. With 100 megs per disk,
you'LL have plenty of room for more.

Backup

You know you have a lot of files you
wouldn't want to Lose. So secure all your
important stuff on Zip disks.

Security

The Iomega Ditto" family of drives is
designed to protect all your important
computer stuff. Whether it's the Ditto
2GB * drive, the Ditto Max drive, or
the new 10GB* Ditto Max Professional
drive, youTL truly have peace of mind.

Backup

Our l-Step1" backup software makes
backing up a breeze. And FullBack“
System Recovery software for Windows1'
or Windows NT* Lets you rest easy,
knowing you can bring the data from a
completely lost system back from brown¬
outs, hard drive crashes, and those
"I-swear-I -h ad-it-y esterday" situatio ns .

STORAGE

Capacity

Iomega Jar 1GB drives and cartridges,
and the upcoming 2GB drive, comfortably
accommodate huge graphics, a hefty
database, even rockin' A/V fiLes. And
since the disks are portable, you can
take them anywhere.

Performance

The Jaz drive can rip through files.

It's fast enough to store and run
applications, and since Jaz disks
have lots of capacity, backing up
your hard drive will be even easier.

Coming Later this year, the Iomega Ciik!1" drive.
The 40Mfl match book -size solution for
portable digital devices.

Handheld Capacity

A single 40MB Clik! disk can store
approximately 40 near 35mm-quality
(mega pixel) digital photographs,
or 400 10-page Microsoft® Word
documents, or 25 10-page PowerPoint®
presentations with graphics, or up to
4 hours of voice dictation * Whewi
That's a lot of stuff.

Possibilities

Clik! disks can make digital cameras,
sub- notebooks, HPCs, projectors, cellular
phones, PDAs, and global positioning
systems even more functional and
compatible. And who knows what other
uses will be invented for Clik! disks.

The future is up for grabs.

SOLUTIONS

SOLUTIONS

.5*

%

Packard Bell.

NEC

IBM

D0LL

•I Apple

r/vznmmm i

SONY

Micron

UNISYS

HITACHI

SIEMENS

NIXDOKF

The Iomega Zip drive is the
new standard in high-capacity
removable storage.

Check out these leading computer
manufacturers who are building
Iomega drives right into
their systems.

Thumbs-up on Iomega Storage Solutions.

Finally, someone out there wants to make your job easier.
Iomega has over 12 million storage solutions in offices and homes
around the world. You can also look for us in service bureaus and
business service centers around the country that have
made Iomega the standard.

tall your corporate reseller and ask
how you can organize your business with
Iomega storage solutions.

Visit our Web site at:

www.i om ega. com/ bizso lutio ns

BECAUSE

ITS YOUR STUFF.*

"All cartridge eaparirievcnmpreHerl, C«nrr«iiffll assumes Zil wfo. Actual eompsKSKo will vaiy with file and hjidware canFfguntiM. Based an averagrazr fils. For that tppttntjffls:

IiufivitSuaJ user results may vary. ZGfl capacity where 1GB*L billion bytes, Cue capacity sported by ywr operating system may differ, rtepsnriing mi the operating lysten reporting urtltty.

©1995 Iswega Corporation. Iamflga, tin Iomega logo, ZiPr and Ja 2 are registered trademarks, and Ditto., Ditto Hu» ZIP' BUILT4H bgo, to media Prmlurcr, Oil!, t-Sttp, FultBuh, ‘Became Iti Tour Staff/ “1ft Like Insurance to The Important Stuff
tin rour fV "ll»e Super. fast, bctrcmaty Vast Personal btatage Drive,- and “The Capacity To Do More" are trademarks or Iomega Corporation. The legos of Packard 0e1L Inc.; NEC LISA, incj IBM Corporation; Deti Computer Corporation; Apple Computer, Inn:
Gitway MOO, Int; Surry Qectranlcs, Inn; Micron electronics, Inc,. Hitachi; Sremens-Nttdarf; and Unisys Corporation are trademarks at those respective companies. Microsoft, Windows, Windnws NT, and PowerPoint are trademarks or Microsoft Corporation.
All other tiademaiita and logos am the properly of the respective ttmipanfes with which they are associated. Alt prices, actual V anticipated, are manufacturers suggested; retail prices. Actual prr« may vary.

Use only genuine Zip disks featuring this symbol j Zip [1 in, your Zip drive.

Iomega

IMAGES; WEMOl FfOADECK

FETISH

Circarama

With OydoVis ion's Para Cam era, you
can capture video in a panorama, then
play it instantaneously on a PC screen.
While some 360-degree camera sys¬
tems shoot film one angle at a time
and piece together the images later,
CydoVision's camera takes continuous
video with its curved mirror and
unwraps images real time with the
included software. For a little more
dough, the company also sells server
software that pushes these all-around
worlds to Web pages. ParaCamera 52:
US$3,000, Cy do Vision Technologies:

+1 (212)499 0909.

Pugilist

Having sold more than 1 0 million
Tamagotchis in the US alone, Bandai
has taught kids much about nurturing
and caring for pets. Its latest offering,
DigtMon, now adds a touch of Thanatos
to the previously pacifists toy. After a
few days of feeding the little monsters,
kids can connect the plastic "cages"
and make the virtual occupants battle.
It's cooler than POGs, cleaner than
cockfighting, and, most important,
shows that Bandar's digital beasties
can be naughty as well as nice, Digi*
Mon: US$15. Bandai: on the Web at
www. bandai com/.

McCoy

ThrustMaster based the design of its
Millennium 3D Inceptor on an older
joystick it had built for the space shut¬
tle. Mow, the gaming-hardware com¬
pany and government contractor has
decided to sell one - and only one -
of the original NASA-bound sticks.
Mind you, this is a "rotational hand
controller" - not a joystick. But Thrust-
Master will add a peripheral cord and
base to make it ready for any old PC.
Rotational hand controller: U5$10,000.
ThrustMaster: +1 (503)6153200.

WIRED MARCH 1998

FETISH

Wheelie

With a new line of racing wheelchairs
and glossy ads in Glamour, Bob Hall is
blurring the line between high-perfor¬
mance sports gear and tools for the
physically challenged. The superlight
Defiant handcyde, for instance, boasts
21 speeds, trispoke composite wheels,
and a brushed-akiminum frame. Pow¬
ered by adjustable cranks, the Defiant
cruises at a cool IS mph on the road -
or dirt trails if you opt for mountain-
bike tires. Hall, the lead designer of his
company's custom-fit cycles and chairs,
is well acquainted with the need for
speed - he's a former Boston Marathon
record holder. Defiant: US$2,500. New
Hall's Wheels: * 1(617) 628 7955.

Soho

Working in your underwear has never
been so hip. In fact, marketers have
dubbed the small office/home office
soho to conjure images of the trendy
Manhattan neighborhood. In this vein,
Xerox makes an office machine that
perfectly suits the collar-free lifestyle.
The curvy and compact WorkCentre
connects to a PC and offers faxing,
copying, scanning, and full-color print¬
ing. Says Lunar Design's Ken Wood,
who envisioned its shape, "We wanted
to make it stylish as well as comfort¬
able and intuitive, like a toaster or
teapot," WorkCentre 450c: US$499.
Xerox: +1 (201) 968 3000.

Frankenstein

Fischertechnik Mobile Robots have
been unleashed For 13 years, Fischer-
werke, based in Germany's Black For¬
est, has made snap-together robot kits
- essentially Erector Sets with brains -
that connect to your computer with a
37i-foot ribbon wire. Previously, you
could program your bot to follow a
short routine, and watch it perform on
your desk. Now the robots are endowed
with enough onboard RAM to store
instructions. Get the 350-piece kit,
assemble it, and write a program to
send your invention to the kitchen and
grab a snack from the fridge. Mobile
Robot: US$399. Tim King Electronics:
+1 (313)928 2598.

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FETISH

Pkkle

Who is the future Cy Young Award win¬
ner on your Little League team? Rawl¬
ings's new Radar Ball will tell you.
Regulation size and weight, the ball
has a small LCD on its side that gives
a pitcher's speed instantly* It uses an
internal accelerometer to sense when
the ball leaves a pitcher's hand and
when it hits the catcher's glove. Speed
is calculated based on the set distance
from the pitcher's mound to home
plate - whether you're using the 60-
foot, 6-inch version for big-league
ballparks or the 46-foot one for Little
Leaguers, Radar Ball: US$34,99, Rawl¬
ings: +1 (31 4) 349 3500, on the Web at
www, ra wlings. com/.

Thin Client

Mitsubishi's Pedion has a slender pro¬
file but packs a punch. This silvery box
is a miraculous seven-tenths of an
inch thick and weighs 3.1 pounds.

£ven more miraculously, its 233-MHz
processor and 32 megs of RAM keep
pace with everything else on the road.
The unit's battery life disappoints, but
the larger-than-average keyboard
does eliminate one major problem
with today's tiny computers: keys so
small you have to hire a child to type
for you. Pedion: less than US$6,000,
Mitsubishi Electronics America:

+1 (714) 220 2500.

Grid

Recent experiments in the UK to send
data through electric-power lines
show that the technology still has a
few kinks to work out. In the mean¬
time, you can use the same idea to set
up a local-area network in your house.
By transmitting data over 110-volt
electrical wires and using plain old
outlets as ports, the Passport system
links PCs around the house at data
rates as high as 350 Kbps. The setup
works a little slower if you activate the
encryption option - but at least you
won't have to worry about blasting
private emails across the neighborhood
power lines. Passport: U5$249,99.
Intelogis: +1 (801) 756 5199.

Thanks to Jacob Ward,

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Ah W&ryrl

You’re looking to stash some cash, fast.

The tax-deferred kind. So you’re shopping for a retirement
account. IRA, Roth IRA, 401k, whatever.

You’ll probably pick a stock fund. So narrow the field: pick a fund
that’s run by stock-picking fanatics.

People who pick stocks one company at a time. Who don’t bet
your money on trends or market indicators. And know there are
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Finding those opportunities for your money is what gets them up
every morning.

Think you’ll find those fanatics by April 15?

~~ ' ~ How fast can you call Janus? - —

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Call for a prospectus containing more complete information, including expenses. Please read it carefully
before you invest or send money, Or visit our Web site at wwwr Janus .com.

Janus Distributors, Ene. Member NASD. WIRE 478

JANUS

Get there.

IMAGE; GIRL RAY

HDTV

Rebel

NEWMEDIA

Twelve years after founding one of the first high-definition production houses,
Barry Rebo emerges as a leader of the suddenly fast-growing field.

II t January’s International Consumer Electronics
Show in Las Vegas, brand-new HDTV sets were
everywhere, fed by a continuous stream of high-
definition television programming from the three
big names in high definition: CBS, PBS, and ... Rebo
Studio. With its 125 hours of long- form HD program¬
ming, Rebo Studio - a 12-person production house in
Manhattan founded by Bariy Rebo - is ostensibly the
biggest producer of HD programming in the US, from
commercials and music videos to Wild Life Adventures
for Turner Original Programming and the documen¬
tary A Passage to Vietnam.

Rebo and his loyal cadre of HD enthusiasts have been
producing HDTV programming since 1986, at a time
when most Americans had n’t even heard of NTSC, the
current broadcast standard. But Rebo has been ahead of
the curve his entire video career, accumulating what he
calls t£a healthy record of firsts,” starting with dropping
out of Stanford University’s graduate film school and
hying to Japan to buy the first-ever portable color video
equipment. He launched Rebo Associates in 1975, dedi¬
cated to “film -style* video stoiytelllng*

Like many a video storyteller, Rebo had the bug to
tell stories in celluloid. So, in 1986, when he saw the
astonishing imagery of an HDTV program transferred
to 55-mm film, he thought it so “revolutionary” that
he plunked down US$1,5 million for the first Sony HD
camera and editing packages sold in the US.

“Eve never wavered from my belief that high -definition
TV will be a big part of the imaging industry,” says Rebo.
“I just didn’t foresee the politics and dramatic changes
in technology.”

Those technopolitical debates stalled HDTV for nearly
10 years - from 1987 to 1996 - but Rebo kept the faith
through those difficult, often lean times. In fact, it was
a productive period at Rebo Studio. His technical gurus
Barry Minnerty and Abby Levine created Restore, which

fteho's studio:
from pioneer
to powerhouse.

enables any Macintosh imaging software to run in LID,
while his studio kept churning out HDTV programs,
some of which - like FooVs Fire , a puppet fantasy-
drama by Julie Taymor made for the
late PBS showcase “American
Playhouse” - garnered
critical acclaim.

With the FCC
mandate for TV
networks to broad¬
cast HDTV starting
this year, Rebo at
last can stop push¬
ing that rock up the
hill and look forward
to getting down to Lhe
business of producing
HDTV programming
and equipment

“Everybody’s always
saying Pm a pioneer”
he remarks. “Our new
slogan is 'Once a pio¬
neer, today the expert.1 ”

- Debra Kaufman

Wired 6,03

New Media

71

Tomorrow Today 76

The New Economy 70

Updata

86

Crucial Tech

89

Hype List

96

The^Netizen

99

Why Cable Is Lining Up for Another Potential Beating

Three years after interactive television fizzled
Into vaporware, the cable industry is at it again.
Executives are talking tough. Equipment makers are
bullish. Bill Gates and other cybergeeks are pushing
software and operating systems. Even TCI chair John
Malone, who prema¬
turely predicted a
"500-channel uni¬
verse/' is talking up a
storm."l haven't been
this excited since
Universal gave us
Jaws on HBQ," Malone
recently proclaimed.
Why does the cable industry now appear ready
for another potential beating? The answer is one
of economics, better technology, and the Internet.

On the economic front, digital converters that
once cost thousands are now a few hundred dollars.
In December, TCI inked a multibtllion-dollar deal
with General Instrument for up to 12 million boxes.
G1 then turned around and agreed to sell a US$187.5
million chunk of itself to Sony. Meanwhile, the

industry's research arm, CableLabs, is establishing
a set-top standard, further driving down prices.

In terms of technology, the options have diversi¬
fied - from simplistic software that pumps data
through the TV's vertical blanking interval to net¬
work computers that offer video email. Companies
like WorldGate, Interactive Channel, and Wink Com¬
munications - as well as behemoths like Microsoft,
Sun, and Oracle - are making hard sells.

And then there's the Internet TG, Cox, and Com¬
cast have partnered with @Home Network, an
Internet cable-modem company. Time Warner and
#Home rival MediaOne have joined forces. And
don't forget Microsoft, whose $1 billion investment
in Comcast warmed Wall Street to broadband cable.

The cable guys also want some of the electronic
commerce pie. Malone and others talk of ordering
pizza, linking to advertisers'Web pages - all with
the dick of a remote.

So, cable optimists argue, a lot has changed since
the last run at interactivity. Now they're just hoping
that the best thing since Jaws doesn't eat them for
lunch - again. Duh-dum duh-dum. - Michael Grebb

a2b o> Not to Be?

Last year music pirates took to the
Web in droves to download MP3-
compressed CD -quality singles for free.
This state of affairs kept most record
companies out of cyberspace. The few
that did venture online found
themselves mired in lawsuits
against online bandits.

Now AT&T has stepped in
with a spin-off company, a2b
music, that pairs compression
algorithms and encryption
technologies to offer sterling-
quality singles over the Net.

For speedy delivery7, the col¬
lectibles are 50 percent
smaller than normal audio hies.

a2b appears to be successfully treading
the tightrope between consumers, artists,
promoters, and retailers. Its security fea¬
tures protect against theft while allowing
flexible licensing such as single, multiple.

or shared uses of files. Customers pay
a small fee - usually a dollar or less
each - for these musical gum halls.

So far, an impressive collection of
record companies have flocked to the
service, including Trans-
world, N2K, Gamelot Music
stores, and BMC Entertain¬
ment, the US$6,3 billion dis¬
tributor of Arista, RCA, and
Windham Hill labels. Most
important, a2b has attracted
a long roster of artists. “We’re
not trying to dictate to the
industry,” notes CTO Howie
Singer. “But it’s our intention
to make this work for everybody."

The Net may be a hot new distribution
method for music, but the payoff for record
companies will come with bulk shoppers.
Alter a singles trial, several labels plan to
launch full Web CD releases. - Colin Berry

Paired once again with the sharp-witted
Garry Trudeau (right) of Do ones bury fame,
Robert Altman is turning his discerning lens
on the high tecti industry. The last time these
two teamed up was to create the HBO mini¬
series Tanner 88 f an acclaimed and edgy
chronicle of a fictional presidential campaign.
Their latest small-screen venture. Kilter App,
includes a "colorful cast of characters, with
Silicon Valley as the backdrop/’ says Andrew
Steinberg of the production firm Kushner-
Locke. The live-action, one-hour weekly series
is in early stages of development and may air
on ABC this fall. - Jennifer Hillner

WIRED MARCH 199S

IMAGE TOP LEFT: SCOTT MENCHIN; ALTMAN: STEVE SHAPIfiD/GAMMA LIAISON; TRUDEAU- EMMVNELLA GAP DNEfl/ OUTLINE

IMAGES IFRQM TOP LEFT}; LARRY KEENAN /IMAGE BANK BARROS 4 6 A R RO S / i M A G E BANK; M, RUTHERFORD/SUPSRSTQttf; BAflROS + 9 AELft OS/ 1 M AGE RANK

Media Rants

Blind New Science of Making

By Jon Katz

Babies

For a revealing look at the American media’s
schizophrenic and dysfunctional relationship
with technology, as well as morality and medical
ethics, we need go no further than the ongoing
celebration in Carlisle, Iowa.

'Hie November hoopla over the birth of the
McCaughey septuplets is nothing compared with
what’s to come: The family’s move into their new,
community-funded home. Free trips to Disney¬
land and Sea World. The seps going to school,
falling in love, getting married, going to college
and - to be witnessed by those of us still alive -
making child- rearing decisions of their own.

The dramatic demonstration
of the new power of medical
technology has been enthusias¬
tically embraced by corporate
and political America, and by
journalism, the pliant cousin
of both.

The McCaugheys appeared
on Dateline chatting with Jane
Pauley and on ABC World News
Tonight accepting the keys to a
donated new van, as well as on
the cover of Newsweek, where Kenny and Bobbi -
the latter’s teeth digitally enhanced, the red-faced
magazine later admitted - announced “We’re
Trusting in God.”

They’ll need him, too, now that they’ve brought
into the world seven babies they can’t possibly
care for themselves - he’s a clerk at a car dealer¬
ship, she’s a seamstress.

The United States has odd ethical concerns
about technology. Let Johnny log on to the Play¬
boy Web site, ajid moral watchdogs turn out in
force. Let a real thorny issue surface - cloning,

The new power of
medical technology
has been embraced
by corporate and
political America,
and by journalism,
the pliant cousin
of both.

genetic engineering, powerful fertility drugs -
and there’s hardly a guardian in sight.

Right here, on our nightly newscasts, on maga¬
zine covers and newspaper front pages - and in
the thoughtless way they’re marketed - reckless
decisions are mindlessly endorsed by everyone
from the president down to the headline writer
and presented in simplistic, emotionally manipu¬
lative ways.

Who, after all, wants to be critical of cute little

babies fighting for their lives, or of the deeply
religious mother who gave birth to them at the
will of no less an authority than God himself?

But who speaks for preemies like these in the
age of multiplying multiple births? Medical ethi-
cists warn us in vain of the implications of fer¬
tility drugs, artificial insemination, surrogate
parenting, genetic screening, and cloning.

Child-development experts say that having
four, five, or six siblings the same age raises all
sorts of psychological and developmental chal¬
lenges. Fertility specialists warn, on those Few
occasions when they’re asked, that the parents
of multiple children are rolling dice with their
children’s lives. If they lose, they could be taking
home children with severe deformities.

Problems of premature infants, warned one
Massachusetts General Hospital neonatologist,
include chronic lung disease, blindness, stroke,
cerebral palsy, and long-term learning disabili¬
ties. According to experts, for seven normal
babies who survive the concern is not so much
what is likely to happen as what isn’t.

In the era of HMDs, expensive, complex fertil¬
ization and implantation procedures are increas¬
ingly available to the poorly insured and the poor,
who may not be able to afford basic care and rou¬
tine medical procedures for multiple children.
Meanwhile, millions of dollars are poured into
this “brave new science” of making babies.

Media coverage of this artificial business leaves
elemental questions unresolved. How far can we
- should we - go to make babies? Who weighs the
cost of this babymaking and baby rearing against
the need to attend to more pressing medicai mat¬
ters? Who Is responsible for raising and caring for
die record number of babies - sure to increase -
we can now make?

In the context of the McCaugheys’ lives - their
religious background and their close-knit, all-
American community - we were presented with
a happy miracle.

But it might not have been one. In modern-day
America, we have so far opted to let technology
decide moral issues for itself, m m m

Email Jon Katz at jonkatz@beilatlantic.net

In the age of high
tech babymaking,
preemies are in
search of a
spokesperson.

□ 3

WIRED MARCH 1 9 9 B

©

Postmodern

Muse

Ask Wally Brill to identify his musical
spiritual center, and he’s as likely to
point to Miles Davis or Johnny Cash as Salif
Keita. Before producing records for such art¬
ists as Thomas Dolby and 999, Brill grew up
in a “secular” New York household. Ironic,
then, that Brill's disco very in a friend's attic
of a stack of 78s - discs featuring Jewish
liturgical singers from the 1920s to the
'50s - has resulted in The Covenant, a most
spiritual, and controversial, pop CD.

Recorded from the 78s and transferred
into electronic files, songs feature cantors
Pierre Finchik, Samuel Malavsky, and oth¬
ers, their hazzanut delivered with divinity
and soaring praise. Loops of indigenous
percussion and vocals surge to an elec¬
tronic beat. Though its words are undeni¬
ably Hebrew, the disc savors musical styles
associated with Muslim and Buddhist faiths
and stirs in some New Age philosophy and
native rhythms. Temple cantors once sang
in opera halls, Brill explains, but now he

is delivering them -
via digital media and
aboriginal instrumen¬
tation - to a contem¬
porary audience.

Surprisingly, BrilPs
loudest critics are old-
school Jewish cantors.

So me co n tern po ra ry
cantors have Labeled
his smorgasbord “primitive”; others have
simply suggested he not mess with the past,
4i get a lot of criticism because 1 Lise Deepak
Chopra on the record,” says Brill between
bites of bagel, “but he’s got a lot to say -
namely that we’re in a realm of all possi¬
bilities and have the power to bring things
into being”

Brill claims to find divinity in all sounds.
“All music is spiritual - even the Spice Girls ”
Brill grins, “though for me, they don’t speak
as divinely as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan”

- Colin Berry

At Computer Film Company in Culver City
California, DreamWorks SKG producers eye
digital effects for the upcoming feature Paulie on
a monitor and discuss changes with the artists.
Just a typical day in Hollywood - except that the
images and the digital artists creating them are
nearly 6,000 miles away in London.

What makes this long distance
creative collaboration possible is
Sohonet, a digital pipeline between
the two far-flung cities that just
opened for transatlantic business.

Digital networking is nothing new,
but until now it's been the sole domain of
big-budget filmmakers. Sohonet makes It as
easy and routine as a phone call. According to
managing director Neil Harris, Sohonet is
the brainchild of staff at digital-effects and
postproduction facilities clustered in London's
media-hot Soho neighborhood. Four years ago,

ATM was an untried technology in the film busi¬
ness, but in late 1995 five companies hooked up
to give it a try. Once united, Sohonet turned its
sights to Hollywood. "For Hollywood stu¬
dios that have offices in London,"
says William Sargent, executive
director of Megalomedla,
"Sohonet is the potential
umbilical cord."

For now, on ly transatla ntic
Cinesite and Computer Film
are able to easily use the ser¬
vice. Future network upgrades
will support videoconferencing, higher-resolution
files, and a direct connection to major US stu¬
dios, ad agencies, and production companies.

"There's not enough capacity in LA to satisfy
the huge appetite for effects work," reveals Harris.
"We hope to help take away some of the strain."
- Debra Kaufman

Is an Advertisement

Two of the newest frontiers of
advertising take advantage of
captive audiences: consumers
at the gas pump and the cash
machine. Electronic Data Systems
has begun testing 15-second
spots on 150-plus ATMs in the
San Diego area. Rio Network of
Raleigh, North Carolina, beams
ads to US gas pumps via satellite.

While pump ads are limited
mostly to LCD readouts, EDS goes
higher tech at ATMs, with full-
color video ads and movie clips.

Do consumers mind the intrusion?

Rio's Dick Diemer says no, so long
as it's brief. After all, he adds,

"people don't like to stop for gas
in the first place/' - Chris Rubin

WIRED MARCH 1998

IMAGES (CL0CKWJSE fBOM T0P>. CHRISTINE AUCINO; LOU BEACH; PAULA LUKEY

Stoplights can feel like an eternity. So to combat boredom
the GS-T is equipped with leather trim, a 6-way adjustable
sport seat, and 210-peak watts of premium audio. This way
time flies while you're standing still

Tell David Hansen he has his head in the stars
and he won't take offense. You see, David's
an astronomy buff, and even his choice of
car was influenced by celestial bodies. David
drives a turbocharged, 210-horsepower*
Eclipse Spyder G5-T, which aligns perfectly
with his interest in cosmic
phenomena.

We take fun seriously. Which means the Eclipse Spyder
has some serious engineering. Starting with a reinforced
chassis and a suspension that's engineered specifically
for this convertible. You see, the only thing we want
rocking and rolling in our car is the stereo. For more
details on the Eclipse Spyder, call 1-80Q-55MITSU. Or
cruise by our web site at www.mitsucars.com

—.MITSUBISHI

I i ECLIPSE SPYDER

Okay, so the hat's history. No problem. Just hold
a button for ten seconds and you have shade.
High-quality, power- operated, fully-lined, doth-
covered shade. Now hit the accelerator and watch a I
the other cars disappear in the glass rear window.

Place hat on head. Press accelerator.

Buy new hat

Pick the apex of a nice,
challenging corner. Now point
and shoot. With the Eclipse Spyder's
4-wheel independent multi-link suspension
and speed-sensitive power steering, you'll hit
the target every time.

Eclipse Spyder GS starts at S 2 1,4-30. Eclipse Spyder GS-T shown MSRP
$26,660 plus $420 destination/handling (Alaska $540), Excludes tax, title, license,
registration fee, dealer options and charges. Prices and vehicle availability may
vary. Actual prices set by dealers. "205 hp with automatic transmission.

What's coming. By Jesse Freund

orrow Today

Spring 1998
Restart Me Up
Freshly minted Windows 98
CDs are shrink-wrapped and
shipped to the far reaches of
the planet - just in the nick
of time. Explorer is finally an
OS element, despite the pro¬
testations of federal antitrust
pro sec utors. Th e bro wser is h
interface, and support for
DVD hardware - plus the
Universal Serial Bus - drives
sales past the SO million
Win95 units soldThe kickoff
song: another Bolling Stones
golden oldie/ You Can't
Always Get What You Want"

Summer 1998
Writing to Disc
Computers equipped with
DVD-RAM drives arrive on
Costco shelves, but the debut
is less than auspicious. Costly
capture boards are required
for recording video, so the
5.2-Gbyte discs will be used
for the less exciting task of
backing up data - lots and
lots of data. And Sony's com¬
mitment to an alternate
RAM standard, DVD+RW,
leaves consumers confused.
No matter; the potential for
new markets (read: porn]
sparks retail demand for
recordable DVD players.

Fall 1998
Aquatic Rocket

Boeing's Sea Launch, a 660-
foot-long command ship that
controls a 3 0,000 -ton oil rig
turned launch pad, hauls a
rocket out to sea and fires off
a satellite from the middle
of the Pacific Ocean. The
inquisitive might wonder,
why all the fuss? It seems
aquatic, near-equatorial
launches best utilize Earth's
rotational forces - saving
fuel, ensuring a longer life
in orbit, and allowing com¬
panies to shoot ever-larger
satellites into space.

Spring 1999
Beer-Bottle Boon
Barroom brawlers find them¬
selves in a quandary when
Superex Polymer releases
technology to manufacture
airtight plastic bottles. Beer
bottlers have had to rely on
glass because plastic allows
oxygen to leak in. Superex
has found a way to make an
air-resistant liquid-crystal
polymer - the thick plastic
used for electrical connectors
- thin enough to be placed
inside a bottle.The light¬
weight plastic spells cheaper
beer (mm m ... cheap beer)
and wild new packaging.

2000

Intranet of Intranets

Nasdaq completes its Enter¬
prise Wide Network II, The
new net supports trading on
the magnitude of 4 billion
shares a day, scalable to
8 billion shares, and proves
to be the world's largest and
fastest intranet. Quite an
impressive feat, unless you
consider that on October 28,
1997, total market transac¬
tions numbered a record 1,37
billion, causing network oper¬
ators to wonder how many
trades a panic - er, correction
- can engender.

Spring 1998
Matinee Mayhem
A year after Tamagotchis
rampaged through schools
like Game Boys on juice, a
remake of Godzilla sets Holly¬
wood on fire. Once again,
Japanese pop culture lands
on the Main Street marquee
- albeit 44 years after the
original movie's premiere.
Toho, the Japanese distribu¬
tion company that owns the
rights to the film, has long
protected Godzilla more
vigilantly than Coca-Cola
guards Coke™. But thanks
to the prying ways of TriStar
Pictures, moviegoers finally
revisit the wonders of Mon¬
ster Island.

Fall 1998

Internet Throwback
The completed Internet!
wi res 1 1 6 u n i verities to a
new high-performance net¬
work. After starting with a
paltry 34 sites back in 1996,
the finished project harks
back to the early academic
days of the now commercial¬
ized Net. Nostalgia aside,
internet! heralds cutting-
edge advances - such as
band width -reservation ser¬
vices, support for IPv6, and
an architecture built around
gigaPOPs [gi gab it -capacity
points of presence) - that
should eventually seep into
commercial networks.

Fall 1998

Nova Scotia Cares
Canada's first pro vince wide
telemedicine network, the
Nova Scotia TeleHeaith Net¬
work, holds the distinction
of being one of the largest
public-health communica¬
tions projects in the world
and the first to connect every
hospital (43 sites) in an entire
jurisdictionJn human terms,
rural doctors from the east¬
ern regions can send X rays
of fishing injuries to radiolo¬
gists in Halifax, while MDs
across the land share exper¬
tise and images to pin down
vexing diagnoses.

fall 1999
New Dune

Bantam Books's US$1 million
investment in a trilogy of
Dune prequels - coauthored
by Frank Herbert's son, Brian,
and SF author Kevin Ander¬
son - comes out just in time
for holiday shoppers. Fans
compare the new offering
to the original series, hoping
that Junior has managed to
capture the majesty of Sen¬
ior's vision instead of the
campy cult status of the film
version starring Sting. Either
way, considering that the
original Dane sold nearly 10
million copies, the publisher
is the biggest winner

2001

Mario's Cap and Gown

Students at DigiPen, the
videogame institution of
higher ed u cati o n , ta ke th e
long walk to the real world
when the so-called Donkey
Kong U. doles out the world's
first bachelor of science
degree in real-time interac¬
tive simulation. During the
previous four years, pupils in
the maiden class have stud¬
ied mathematics, physics,
p rog ram m i n g, a n d a n i mat ion .
Now, equipped with little
more than that coursework
and the idealism endemic
to recent grads, they leave
the warm nest of college for
the cold, hard realities of the
gaming industry.

06

WIRED MARCH 1998

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IMAGE- MICHAEL SEXTON

China,

THENEWECONOMY

Big Time

©

Don Xia's ChinaBiG appears to have an advantage any monopoly would envy:

the government's blessing. But some see this blessing as decidedly mixed.

On first pass, ChinaBiG (wwwxhinabig.com/) faces
the same huge expectations and slim chances of
any online start-up. Sure, the Hong Kong- based com¬
pany boasts an impressive 2 million business listings
in its Yellow Pages-style directoiy, and, true,
they’re bilingual (Chinese and English), offering
Chinese businesses access to foreign markets,
and vice versa. But ChinaBiG relies on typical
Web revenue streams such as advertising and
site hosting, and as the 91 online direc¬
tories that failed in the fourth quarter
of 1997 can tell you, these streams
aren’t flowing like they should.

And yet, for a start-up, ChinaBiG
appears to have an advantage even
Bill Gates might envy: a monopoly,
the blessing of the Chinese government,
and its own infrastructure. The venture v
is one of the first new media companies
launched by China Unicom, In the
early ’90s, a combination of state and
private funding led to the creation of
Unicom, which the 35-year-old CEO
of ChinaBiG, Don Xia, claims has
the lead in building the next genera¬
tion of long distance backbon e net¬
works - via fiber optics, microwave,
and satellites - that will transmit
the Internet telephony, faxes, and
wireless communications essential
to doing business overseas,

“I don’t see many disadvantages
to our ties with the government,”

Xia says. “But the advantages are many.” Among them,
a shared monopoly with the Ministry of Posts and Tele¬
communications on the government’s business listings,
which include the updated phone, fax, and street
addresses of all Chinese businesses.

“But how well organized and accurate and
rapidly updated is that information? Have you
ever dealt with a Chinese bureaucracy?” asks
Milton Mueller, author of China in the Informa¬
tion Age7 who stresses the “vicious” competition
between state-sponsored enterprises like
Unicom, the MPT (which claims 98
percent of China’s telephone market),
and the news agency Xinhua. Says
Mueller, “The state connection is as
much a curse as it is an advantage ”
Xia, however, is optimistic, owing in
part to how much he’s already accom¬
plished and in part to the potential for
growth. Xia first got hands-on experience
with the Yellow Pages when he delivered
the hefty books in the Los Angeles area,
a part-time job during graduate school at
USC. He later founded and played pri¬
mary roles in several Chinese telecom
companies. Today, Xia points out, China
has more than a billion consumers
but less than 10,000 active Web sites.
“Unlike in the States, where you have
to become very specialized and Fast,”
Xia says. “We see online business as
a wide-open opportunity”

- Christopher Jones

Xia's ChinaBiG boasts
2 million business listings
in the Greater China region*

WIRED MARCH 1998

Esther Dyson m

Just as EDventure Holdings chair Esther
Dyson has made her mark stateside as a
consummate networker and author, her repu¬
tation precedes her in Central Europe, where
she's helped fledgling entrepreneurs become
market leaders. What's not yet dear, however,
is whether Dyson can apply her magic to
her own Central European businesses.

Though she owns and manages minor
investments in Hungary and the Czech
Republic, Dyson has invested most heav¬
ily in Poland, which she finds "the
most appealing" because in this
country of 40 million, business is
growing fast and" they all need
better systems."

In 1994 she used US$50,000
to help launch an Internet
service provider, Poland
On Line (aka Polska
OnLme), By mid-1997 it
had 50 employees and
2,200 subscribers, including
500 busInesses.The 1996 rev-
enue, however, was a meager
$165,000. She raised more money for Polska
throughout '96, securing a capital infusion
from Dan Lynch at CyberCash, among others.
(The total cap, she says, is nearing $800,000.)

Poland

She also emphasized custom software devel¬
opment, merging Polska with Buk B T.

"The goal is to expand rapidly, but carefully,"
Dyson asserts. "We have strong programmers,
and we want to become an important force
in the software-development market."

Ask around in Poland and it's plain that
Dyson is held in high regard, owing in large
measure to the annual East-West High-Tech
Forum, held first in Budapest in t99Q/'Her role
was tremendous," says Bogdan Wisniewski,
vice president of Warsaw- based Computer-
Land."Esther helped us know the future and
accommodate to that "Today, as a Computer¬
Land board member, "she is on the telephone,
listening." In contrast, Wisniewski says, US
partners previously "came to untried to show
us how to do business, but didn't listen. Esther
was different. She was trying first to under¬
stand what the rules were here, what were
the differences."

Though obviously appreciative of her
efforts, Wisniewski hesitates to say whether
Dyson's companies will prosper. Polska Online
executive Slawomrr KulagowskI is convinced
that they will. While Polish business chiefs
sweat this year's IT demands, Kulagowski
says, "Esther's horizons start after five years,"

- Peggy Simpson

Watching the Predictors

Canadian High Tech
Tax Dodge

Residents of Quebec recently
learned that some of their local
restaurateurs are on the tax-
evasion vanguard. Someone
hacked a Gamma Microsystems
software program most Canadian
hotels and restaurants use to
tally and report sales tax, allow¬
ing the restaurant owners to
underreport their earnings and
deny the government millions.
Revenue Canada, the govern¬
ment's tax-collecting arm, has
responded with a tech-enhanced
investigation* As government
spokesperson Michel Cleroux
told Toronto's Globe and Mail,

"We have computers, too*1'
- Bill Brazell

While wc know that ecommerce keeps

growing, by how much is anyone's guess.
And analysts don’t make matters any easier.
Their estimates for United States online sales
in 2000 differ by as much as US$61 billion,
and not only that, their estimates of actual
ecommerce revenues in 1996 don’t mesh,
either. (See chart at right.)

Why the vast disparity? For starters, there’s
little consensus about what ecommerce mea¬
sures. And each company uses a slightly differ¬
ent model to make its forecasts. Most conduct
a survey: I DC talks to 40,000 Net users, Data-
quest interviews 5,000 online shoppers, and
Jupiter and Forrester question Web merchants.
Revenues are then derived using a variety of

methods that include guesstimating growth
based on assessments of current Web -user
behavior (fDC), contrasting numbers with
secondary ecommerce r esearch from ACNielsen
and Commerce Net (Dataquest), comparing
estimates with hard numbers gathered from
major online retailers (Forrester), or project¬
ing ecommerce growth as a portion of total
online audience (Jupiter).

The good news: all four research compa¬
nies report underestimating their 1996 figures.
The bad news: none have developed a way to
forecast without resorting to old over-the-
counter sales models, even though ecommerce
obviously eliminates the counter.

- Michael Behar

Ecommerce Revenues ius$ billions)

An*- - *

1996 2000

Source

JDC Research

$94

-

Forrester Research-

$1.4

$117

J u ptterCo m munjfatio ns

^ i r

Dataquest

$0.7

$6.4

aar, •»

$15.6

$56

WIRED MARCH } 9 9 E

it

MAGES IFR0M TOP LEFT): NIGEL PARfcY/tPlr LOU BEACH. COURTESY K GTV

IMAGE: LOU 8 E AC H

High Tech Embraces“0ff$||OrB” EfflplOyCCS

Contrary to the views of Congress, presidential hopefuls, and Ross Perot's Reform Party,
Silicon Valley sees offshore programming as a win-win strategy. Here's why. By David Case

Despite a few hardships, like the time his moth¬
erboard crashed and he had to drive 600
miles to Moscow for a replacement that failed too,
software programmer Alexander Polusko’s career
illustrates how almost anyone anywhere with a
computer and the right programming languages
can tap into the network economy.

From his home in distant Tolyatti, Russia,
Polusko makes a handsome living punching code
for Access Softek, a Berkeley, California, firm with
clients such as Microsoft and Adobe. And Access
CEO Chris Doner couldn’t be happier with Polu-
sko and his peers, pointing out how easy it was
for Access to establish overseas
operations. There were no huge
capital investments, no shipping
nightmares, and none of the
usuai bureaucratic tangles that
encumber traditional foreign
ventures. Plus his Russian pro¬
grammers often get by without
an office.

Sound encouraging? Not
to Russell Verney, chair of the
Dallas-based Reform Party.

To Verney, Polusko represents
“a threat to the American lifestyle.” According to
Verney, “Engineers in the US can’t compete with
programmers in countries like Bangladesh, who
work for a minimum of 60 percent less pay.” And
it’s not only Ross Perot’s cronies who fret over
giant sucking sounds: for similar reasons, several
in the House opposed granting President Clinton
fast-track trade-negotiating status late last year.

Talk to managers and software engineers in
Silicon Valley and you’ll soon learn that these
neoprotectionists don’t speak for them. To software
and multimedia firms in particular, overseas, or
“offshore,” labor holds great promise, a win-win
situation that enriches both American and foreign
workers - and benefits consumers to boot. Global¬
ization, they contend, creates opportunities for
products that would be too expensive to make in
the US alone, while also increasing productivity.
Abroad, they say, outsourcing bolsters wages and
encourages higher education. Moreover, it makes
sense. Despite the two-thirds global market share

Despite the two-
thirds global market
share US software
companies hold, only
one-third of the
world's programmers
live in the US. No
wonder businesses
look abroad.

held by American software companies, only one-
third of the world’s estimated 6 million program¬
mers actually live in the US, and studies released
this January confirmed what leading software
companies already knew: there’s a shortage of
skilled IT workers. Last year only 26,000 comput¬
er science graduates matriculated from US univer¬
sities, and the US Department of Commerce has
reported that 1 in 10 infotech jobs lacks a warm
geek.

No wonder, then, that entrepreneur Jas Dhillon
went to India. He did so not to save money - the
cost differences have become negligible, he says
- but because he was unable to attract employees
in Silicon Valley, even when offering six-figure sal¬
aries. Using code written in Bangalore, he has
launched Blue-Linc/On-Line, a service that enables
construction projects to be managed over the Net.

Morgan Interactive, a multimedia lirm, moved
most of its operations to Vietnam, where it now
employs about 120 artists and programmers.
There, the lirm reduced its costs by a staggering
70 percent - as a result, says Morgan president Ed
Dua, he’s hiring again in San Francisco.

Perhaps most important, high tech employment
departs from the low-wage manual work US busi¬
nesses have historically foisted on contractors in
developing nations. It encourages higher educa¬
tion - and sometimes pays for it. Last year Oracle
trained about 200,000 students abroad, and the
firm plans to spend $50 million to train thousands
more this year. Yes, this is hardly altruism (Oracle
will expand its market by having users abroad),
but Oracle’s programs definitely defy the condi¬
tions of textile sweatshops.

Even The Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (representing nearly 100,000 computer
professionals) disagrees with attempts to shackle
the international labor market “We’ve come to
the conclusion that monopolies - either in terms
of companies or countries - don’t lead to growth,”
says Paul Rostek, president-elect of IEEE-UvSA.
“The competition is actually very good,” he con¬
cludes. “it keeps us on our toes ” m m m

Silicon Valley leaders
don't fear jobs flying
overseas. In fact,
they often have to
leave the country
themselves to find
qualified employees.
Last year there were
just 26,000 computer
science grads in the
United States.

David Case (maleta@eompuserve.com) is a San
Francisco-based journalist.

0i

WIRED MARCH 1998

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© Name-Your-Price Airline Tickets

$50/7

^ f

For business travelers crammed into
crowded rush-hour cabins, it may
come as a surprise that the eight major
US carriers fly jets at an average of only
65 to 70 percent capacity. When marke¬
teer Jay Walker realized this, he began
devising a system using the Internet to
offer consumers a potential deal on the
millions of seats that
fly empty.

The result, Price¬
line.com, debuts
this month, and,
according to Walker,
will enable con¬
sumers to name
the price they'd be
willing to pay for
airline tickets. At
the company's Web
site (www.prLcdine.com/), you simply
provide your itinerary, the price you Ye
willing to pay, and your credit card num¬
ber If an airline accepts, Priceline.com

,6

&

will gel back to you within an hour with
a non re fundable ticket.

“This is not for the businessperson ”
says Walker, whose Stamford, Connecti¬
cut-based Walker Digital Corporation
lined up 12 investors, built a US$25
million budget, installed 80 Web servers,
and reached “solid* agreements with
all the major carriers prior to launch.
*WeYe going to reach what we call the
VFR crowd - the visiting-friends-and-
relatives crowd. They Ye the kind of
people willing to say, 4For the savings,

III take a connection in Minneapolis/”

By the end of 1998, Walker expects
Priceline.com to ring up a million hits
a day for the 1*000 to 3,000 tickets avail¬
able daily. To get those hits, he's spend¬
ing $10 million to advertise this spring.
Says Walker, "The airlines like this sys¬
tem because it gives them an opportunity
to add incremental revenue without dis¬
rupting their retail-fare system*

- Frank Jossi

The Wired Interactive Technology Fund (TWITS)

Mass Murder Bad
for Business

As if moral incentives weren't
enough to discourage state-spon¬
sored murder, University of Texas
professor Gerald W. Scully proves
in his paper "Murder by the State"
that killing one's citizens is bad
for the economy. For one thing,
it's hell on the tax base* There
is, writes Scully/'an inverse rela¬
tionship between the amount of
killing of the domestic population
and the 'value1 of the people
being killed/' For the complete
text of his study, see www.pubik
-policy,org/~ncpa/studies/s2 T 7
ZsIllMmL - Brad Wieners

Company

Primary Business Symbol

Shares

Clasel/2

ASince Purchase Action

TWIT$ and the Russell 2000 spent December treading water.

ArQuIe

Pharmaceuticals

ARQL

8,000

23

+ 5%

hold

Each finished roughly even for the month.

Arbor Software

Ascend Communications

Software

Network hw/sw

AfrSW

ASND

4,000

4,Q0D

41%

25%

- 1%

“ 58%

hold

hold

To start 1998, 1 dipped into theTWIT$ cash reserves to buy
two medical stocks that are off their highs. 1 purchased 3,000

Aware

Network hw/sw

AWRE

14,000

10%

+ 0%

hold

BioChem Pharma

Pharmaceuticals

BCHE

8,000

21 %

- 1%

buy 3,000

shares of BioChem Pharma in front of its Hepatitis B drug launch

Cisco Systems

Network hw/sw

CSCG

3,000

58 y«

- 4%

hold

and 10,000 shares of Fusion, which announced on December 17

Dataware

Software

DWTI

30,000

3%

- 41%

hold

the completion of a Phase 1 trial for its proprietary blood-clotting

Forte Software

Software

FRTE

15,000

7%

-68%

hold

technology, FloSeal Matrix.This trial, conducted at the University
of British Columbia's Vancouver Hospital, used FloSeal Matrix to

Fusion Medical

Medical equipment

FS0N

45,000

3%

-32%

buy 10,000

Informix

Database sw

IFMX

6,675

5 V.

-86%

hold

Intel

Microchips

INTC

2,000

72%

+ 4%

hold

prevent patient blood loss during major surgeries.

Patti oGenesis

Pharmaceuticals

PGNS

4,000

37 %

+ 5%

hold

Everyone hates the data base -softwa re sector right now, but

Pharmacydits

Pharmaceuticals

FCYC

7,000

24%

+ 27%

hold

Hike this entry point for Grade. Oracle's stock price has been
, almost halved since reaching its 52-week high of 42% on
August 20, 1997. Buying now is a pure play on Larry Ellison's

Quick Response Services

Information services QRSI

4,000

35%

+ 5%

hold

New Holdings

Pegasus Systems

Online Commerce

PEGS

8,000

15

buy

Grade

Database sw

ORCi

5,000

22%

buy

ability to restore his greatly diminished net worth.

Cash Holding

$110,821

The only other addition is Pegasus Systems, an online reser¬

Portfolio Value

$2,205,118

vation system for the hotel industry. Most of the hotel chains
own a piece of the company, and its recent deal with Microsoft
positions Pegasus to consolidate a fragmented industry.

Portfolio Performance since 12/1

-1%

Russell 2000 Index

+ 1%

Legend: This fund started with US$1 million on December 1, 1994, We ate trading on a monthly basis, so profits and losses will
be reflected monthly with profits reinvested in the fund or in new stodu.

TWITS is a model established by rtfafdrnat an officially traded portfolio. Jeffery Warddl is a seniar vice president ewouuve financial services representative for
Hambrecht & Quist UC and may fijw a personal interest in Slocks listed in TWlTJ.Ihe opinions Expressed hejan are those of the author and not necessarily

- Jeffery Warded (jwardefl@hamquist.com)

(hose of HfiQ's researdi d?p4rtm?nl.H&Q ha* not verified (he information forttamed in this article and does ml make any representitronstn inaccuracy aivd
rampfetflfleii. Wired readers who use this information for investment decisions do so at their own risk.

WIRED MARCH 1998

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The rest of the story.

Pushover?

Beijing
Banned

When Scott Savitt,
founder of the
English-language
weekly Beijing Scene,
talked to Wired last April ("Agent of Cul¬
tural Evolution," page 65), his paper's
future was uncertain. In May it folded. The
way Savitt tells it, the 25,000-circulation
paper was swept up in a phenomenon
particular to modern China; As the Hong
Kong handover approached, the Beijing
government began to look for possible
sources of dissent. That same government
also happened to publish a monthly com¬
petitor, Beijing This Month, which was
struggling for ad revenue. Both bode
poorly for Savitt's enterprise* These guys
from Beijing This Month came to me and
said 'Don't produce this thing anymore/*
says Savitt, "Their actions clearly weren't
legal, but what we were doing wasn't
legal, either." In the fall Savitt moved to
New York, where he served alongside Chi¬
nese dissident Wei Jingsheng as a visiting
scholar at Colombia University's School of
International and Public Affairs " We're still
trying to negotiate a license," he says. "The
newspaper hasn't been coming out for six
months, but we still consider the hiatus to
be temporary." - Richard Overton

WIRED MARCH ] 99 &

Last March, we told you to "kiss your browser good¬
bye" ("Push!" Wired 5,03)* Perhaps we should
rephrase that. In early 1997, publishers had high hopes
for the new push systems, which could automatically
feed personalized content to readers rather than
waiting for them to pull it from the Web, Inspired by
PointCast's success, dozens of new companies started
developing push products. Netscape and Microsoft
announced push capability in their forthcoming
browsers. Business Week’s February 24, 1997, cover
story declared "Webcasting" the new model for Internet content delivery.

But push has fallen far short of the scenarios spun a year ago. What passes as
"personalization" today amounts to little more than simple keyword matching or
filtering out content categories. And until cable or xDSL modems give home users
video capability, small text-based items like stock prices and news headlines are
the only content capable of being pushed to large audiences.

Even the word push is falling from favor in product descriptions and press
releases. Marketers now speak only of Web site "subscriptions," in voking images
of the humble daily newspaper instead of a full range of personalized content.
PointCast - the original push-media success story - was recently audited as hav¬
ing more than 1 million monthly viewers. Yet even PointCast's Jim Wkkett, senior
VP of worldwide business development, insists that "PointCast isn't push. It's a
news and information service."

The most surprising roadblock for push, though, comes not from technology,
but from the intended audience. Push media's promises are often met with out¬
right resentment from computer owners glad to be free of TV's broadcast model.
"Many people immediately recognized the democratic potential of the Web," says
Julie Petersen, editor at Ikonic, a Web site builder for such companies as Microsoft
and Virgin Records. "Consumers are smarter than media organizations thought.
When push came along, they said, 'I've seen this one-way communication before.
I'm not going to accept it on the Web/"

Ironically, one successful push technology to date is already in its third decade:
email, Internet users loathe spam, but eagerly sign up for regular mailings they
deem useful. Netscape's In-Box Direct emails HTML from more than 125 publishers
to an estimated 3 million subscribers. Why has email succeeded where pop-up
video has stalled? Because consumers have grown acclimated to it over time,
rather than having it thrust upon them as a new paradigm by publishers desper¬
ate for larger audiences. "People are already programmed to check their email
once a day," explains Netscape spokesperson David Bottoms. "We've built on that
by enriching email with HTML and links to the Web."

Still, few publishers are willing to admit giving up on the push medium. Instead,
push's advent looks to be more evolution than revolution. "Push Is an investment,"
says Dave Fester, Microsoft's group project manager."lt's not magic fairy dust you
sprinkle on a product to make it sell better." - Paul Bautin

□ 6

Baht Blues
In Wired’s

September 1996 issue,

Thai media mogul
Sondhi Limttiongkul
vowed to beam digital
satellite television to all of Asia (Thai in
the Sky," page 74). It was part of his grand
plan to build a Pan-Asian media empire
that includes his regional newspaper Asia
Times and magazine Asia fnc But the col¬
lapse of the Thai baht last spring brought
Limthongkul's highly leveraged empire
crashing to Earth. Advertising dollars at his
publishing businesses plummeted. Awash
in red ink, Asia Times closed its doors last
June after blowing through US$60 million
in 18 months. In August, Umthongkul's
private holding company, the M Group,
announced it was divesting from not only
the satellite project but also two wireless
communications ventures that once had
been profit workhorses. As of December,
Asia Inc . was teetering on the brink of
bankruptcy, Limihongkul has salvaged
an online business, a consulting company,
and a handful of other smaller projects -
a far cry from his dreams of becoming
Lord of the Skies. - Alex Salkever

IMAGE FAR LEFT; M. CHANG

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CRUCIAITECH

Ant

for the Web

Professor Paul Kantor's digital-information pheromones sniff out the good stuff on the Web.
But keep your antennae up for intellectual fads and poisoned bait.

When people need a metaphor to describe Web
navigation, they usually reach for a spider. Paul
Kan tor is partial to ants. “They've evolved these chemi¬
cal systems for communicating information," says the
Rutgers University professor of information sci¬
ences. “When you look at people dealing
with any kind of information system, you
realize that each person's decisions - those
he or she makes in the course of
getting to the right informa¬
tion - are essentially lost to
the rest of the world."

Enter digital-information
pheromones, or DIPs, the
concept at the core of a new
Rutgers University project
that aims to “ail lily" the Web
by allowing people lo leave
pointers for those who might
follow in their footsteps. But dealing
with DIPs is no picnic. Kantor's answer
is a network of Ant World Servers and
AntApplels that will allow searchers
to vote on how well a particular page
they land on has satisfied their query.

So what would an ant-enabled
site look like? “Our current thinking
is that you'd see a tiny ant icon
next to a link," explains Kan tor.

Clicking on the insect would pop up
a dialog box describing how useful -
the Web page behind the link had
been to previous visitors.

The idea dates back to 1987, when Kant or, then a
distinguished visiting scholar at the Online Computer
Library Center in Dublin, Ohio, sought a way for patrons
to leave pointers from one book to another. As the Web
grew, so did Kantor's project, until Darpa - realizing
how critical information manage¬
ment is to national security - threw
US$1 million into the undertak¬
ing. Kantor and colleagues Ben¬
jamin Melamed and Endre
Boros expect their ants to break
out of the lab and tunnel onto
the Web by 2000.

A couple of nagging prob¬
lems persist. Aside from the
inevitable pheromone abuse
by unscrupulous marketers,
there exists the troublesome
issue of trendmongering.

“Intellectual fads are dangerous and
wasteful of time," Kantor explains, “If
you accumulate a well-worn path to a
particular page, how do you get people
to another page that has surpassed it
in value?"

Furthermore, Web searchers them¬
selves are a flighty bunch. Asking them
to rate their findings may be tough
when online altruism - and attention
- is in increasingly short supply.
Admits Kantor, “A lot of our success
will depend on not being seen as
another flashy ad." - James Glave

This hug is a feature:
Rutgers University's Paul
Kantor believes we can
become better Web surfers
by mimicking ants.

WIRED MARCH 1 9 9 S

Super Taster

A hundred times more sensitive than

current devices, this biosensor detects
compounds such as drugs or bacteria at
concentrations as low as 9 quadriJIionths
of a gram per square millimeter. Created
at The Scripps Research Institute and the
University of California at San Diego, the
sensor uses a chip of porous silicon - with
an effective surface area of several square
feet - to "taste" the biosample.

“ Mark Frauenfelder

Sound Technology

his soda-bottle-sized device would make a
I swell hood ornament on Buck Rogers's rocket
ship - but it's what is going on inside the unit
that's really the stuff of science fiction. Resonat¬
ing under the shiny sheil are sound waves of an
astonishing amplitude - more than 1,600 times
higher than any made by humans. Put another
way, Los Alamos National Laboratory's Gregory
Swift says, "If you were able to somehow find
yourself inside the small resonating cavity of
this device, hearing loss would be the least of
your worries. Vour hair would catch fire."

The technology is called resonant macro-
sonic synthesis (RMS)r a revolutionary method
of generating and harnessing superhigh-energy
sound waves that's finding its first uses in home
refrigerators and air conditioners.

Unveiled last December in San Diego at the
1 34th meeting of the Acoustical Society of Amer¬
ica, RMS is The i nnovation of Tim Lucas, founder
and CEO of MacroSonix in Richmond, Virginia.

By experimenting with gas-filled chambers
of different cone and buib shapes, Lucas and
his colleagues found it possible to eliminate
the pesky shock waves that typically limit the

energy levels of sound waves, yielding unpre¬
cedented pressure levels.

Beyond home refrigeration, RMS may find
uses in process reactors, noncontaminating

compressors, and pumps for commercial gases
and ultrapure or hazardous fluids (technologies
crucial to the semiconductor and pharmaceuti¬
cal industries). On another front, RMS could be
combined with pulse combustion to convert
fuel to electric power. - Jim Leftwich

The Great Push Forward

The Chinese State Economic and Trade Commission
has unleashed its recipe for jump-starting 166 state-
of-the-art technologies during China’s ninth Five-Year
Plan (1996-2000). The document, which targets China’s
industrial sectors - including electronics, transporta¬
tion, power generation, and telecommunications - is
yet another quinquennial projection spewed forth by
the Chinese government, a practice dating back to the
early days of the People’s Republic in 1953. But don’t

mistake the blueprint for just another
bureaucratic wish list: it’s China’s
high tech R&D hot sheet.

The government hopes
that the six Chinese firms
slated to receive priority
investments of 20 mil¬
lion yuan (US$2.4 mil¬
lion) each will rank
among the world’s 500
largest companies by 2010.
The funding is awarded under

one condition: the firms must promise to undergo tech¬
nological development while steadfastly adhering to
state regulations.

Though kowtowing to government policy may seem
an anachronistic gesture in China’s increasingly market-
driven economy, the state still calls the shots, according
to Wei-chou Su, managing director of the US information
Technology Office in Beijing: “The state regularly desig¬
nates key R&D projects where it provides the people, the
money, and the facilities to boost development. This has
been the tradition here, and it works quite well in the
Chinese context."

Literature released by the Chinese Slate Economic and
Trade Commission also touts the efficacy of R&D “in the
Chinese context” claiming that 1,384 new products were
developed last year and that sales volume on these prod¬
ucts is expected to reach 180 billion yuan ($21 billion).
Deng Xiaoping would be pleased: China’s cat is not only
still catching the mouse, it's being spoon-fed multivita¬
mins to do Lite task even better than before.

- Kristie Lu Stout

Oo

WIRED MARCH 1998

IMAGE TOP RIGHT: TSR I BIOMEDICAL GRAPHICS: IMAGE &EL0W- LOU BEACH

IMAG 1. BUTLER

o

Telecom Goes Qwest

An upstart firm uses the Internet and state-of-the-art fiber laid alongside railroad tracks
to offer phone service at half the going rate. By Steve G. Steinberg

Qwest Communications's December announcement
of 7.5-cents-per-minute long distance phone ser¬
vice was the opening shot across the bow of the tele¬
com behemoths. It wasn't so much that the Denver telco
had undercut the competition by 50 percent, it was that
it was using voice-over-IP (VOIP) technology to do so.

Protesting that the technology just isn't ready yet
AT&T, Sprint, and even WorldCom have taken a caution¬
ary position on the idea of unifying data and voice
over a single network. Qwest on the other hand, went
out and did it While the big guys were captive to their
aging networks built for voice, Qwest took advantage
of the fact that its network was designed for data.

"What's going on is a revolution
in telecom," says Joseph Nacchio,
Qwest's CEO and a former AT&T
exec. "It's going to be as dramatic
as the shift from the telegraph
to the telephone/ echoes Nayal
Shafei, Qwest VP and a graduate
of the MIT Media Lab/We aren't
a telco, we're a multimedia carrier."

Tired rhetoric, perhaps. But the
fact that a 6-year-old start-up
led by an unlikely team of old telephony hands, com¬
puter scientists, and construction experts now has a
market cap of US$6 billion and its competition on the
run is reason enough to listen. And once you learn
what Ires behind the 7.5-cenf solution, it's hard not to
believe that Qwest is right.

The Qwest story begins with Philip Anschutz, A bil¬
lionaire who made his money from oil and railroads,
Anschutz bought Southern Pacific Railroad for $1.8
billion in 1988 and sold it eight years later to Union
Pacific for $5.4 billion. But the real coup was that he
kept the rights-of-way that run parallel to Southern
Pacific's tracks. These narrow strips of real estate
became the basis for Qwest's network, providing a
home for 13,000 miles of fiber-optic cable strung
underground across the US,

Buried alongside the train tracks are now two con¬
duits. The first contains state-of-the art cable, called
nonzero dispersion-shifted fiber, that can carry far
more data than the older fibers laid by companies like
Sprint and AT&T during the 1980s. The second conduit
lies empty, giving Qwest an open track to lay next-
generation technology quickly. Combine Qwest's fiber

The 7.5 -cent solution
for long distance
calling: an unlikely
team of old tele¬
phony hands, com¬
puter scientists, and
construction experts.

with the latest in data transmission and you have a net¬
work far ahead of the com petition /Our network can't
be duplicated by the other carriers," says Nacchio/lt
would be like trying to refurbish a 10-year-old PC with
a new processor and hard drive rather than buying a
brand-new one. It just doesn't make economic sense/

The fast-talking, straight-out-of-New Jersey Nacchio
should know. He was the head of AT&T's consumer
business. Nacchio maintains that the telephone com¬
panies aren't stupid, they're just hamstrung by their
shareholders.

"The telcos realize that a revolution is occurring, but
what are they going to do?" he asks/ff they say they
are going to cut their margins by 50 percent to com¬
pete in this new competitive environment, their stock
will drop 30 points."

Qwest isn't tied to those oid margin structures.

The firm's Internet-savvy technology and massive net¬
work capacity allow it to achieve with 7.S-cent rates the
same margins the other carriers get on tolls twice as
high. For the most part, these savings come from lower
equipment costs. Instead of using switches from Lucent
or Nortel that cost tens of millions of dollars, Qwest
uses Cisco routers priced at maybe a million.

The savings also come from the inherent advantages
of packet switching over circuit switching. Instead of
tying up an entire phone line's capacity no matter how
much is actually being sent, IP sends packets only when
there are packets to send. Most amazing of all, none of
this savings requires a trade-off in voice quality.

This is all part of the plan. Right now, no one is using
VOIP, so bandwidth isn't a problem. Still, while Qwest
will likely be able to meet the technical challenges, the
company is untested when it comes to functions like
customer support.

So what's next for Qwest? Shafei says that the com¬
pany will offer data services like virtual private networks
and concurrent engineering, where engineers collabo¬
rate over the network using high-bandwidth CAD
images.

Maybe calling Qwest a multimedia carrier isn't as
hackneyed as it sounds, m m m

Steve G. Steinberg (steve@steinberg.org) is a Wired
contributing editor and a consultant for a New York invest¬
ment firm. Portfolio managers he consults for may repre¬
sent the companies mentioned.

Multimedia carrier:
Qwest CEO Joseph
Nacchio uses packets
to outpace - and
underprice - the com¬
petition's circuits*

Oi

WIRED MARCH 1 9 9 8

Character Recognition Sheds Its Neurons

Humans have a hard enough time detecting their own
handwriting - imagine trying to make software smart
enough to comprehend the penmanship of every sloppy
writer on the planet, and you see the challenge optical
character-recognition software developers have had for
the past 30 years*

But the suburban-Minneapolis company Silicon Biofogy
believes that it has a far more accurate OCR program than
its competitors, which rely on technology the firm considers
fundamentally flawed. Dubbed Fermat, Silicon Biology's pro¬
gram uses a preclassification system based on a genetic
algorithm akin to natural selection. In contrast, other OCR
programs use a neural network based on the theories of
the late Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov. The
neural model studies the shape and slope of handwriting in
determining content, while Fermat assesses the approxi¬
mately 20,000 ways a human could write a letter of the alpha¬
bet or a number

But does Fermat really have other OCR programs beat? Yes,
says Tony McKinley, a consultant with Pennsylvania-based
Intelligent Imaging, who tested Fermat against 50 competi¬
tors. ultfs not 100 percent accurate, but it outperformed other
OCR systems by a factor of 50 percent or better."

After a six-year struggle to get the firm off the ground,
Silicon Biology founder Eric Anderholm and his staff of 30
have begun to carve out a slice of the US$15 billion form¬
processing industry, attracting a handful of clients, HMOs
and insurance companies among them. But data forms may

Hs

~~ —

. - . . ^

013. 2670

Jsr.i'i

V io as 66

STREET

r

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not be the only area the company applies its expertise* CEO
Doug Johnson says that the technology can also be applied
to classifying spoken words, Asian- language characters, and
white blood cells (a process now performed by the naked
eye and a microscope). - Frank Jossi

Mugspotter

Criminals beware: Person Spotter may be watching.

This new face-recognition software, based on bio*
logical vision, can spot a moving mug and know in sec¬
onds whether it’s on the most-wanted short list Even a
mustache or sunglasses can’t fool the system*

“Our goal is much more ambitious than face recogni¬
tion/’ says Person Spotter’s codevelopcr, University of
Southern California professor Hartmut Me veil, who with
his colleagues at USC and Germany’s Ruhr University-
Bochum founded the company Eyematic Interfaces to
bring their system to market
Indeed, the program is advanced enough to recognize
individuals walking into a room and will soon be able to
determine whether the visitors are grinning or scowling*
The process works by first identifying a person’s location
in an image, then analyzing color and motion cues, and
finally extracting the outlines of features at a fine scale,
which it compares with patterns in the database.

Person Spotter's first commercial task is to control
access to sensitive internal areas in offices at Germany’s
Deutsche Bank. Neven also visualizes airports using the
system to combat terrorism by tracking passengers and
their luggage. - David Pescaviiz

Tiny Transmission

The problem with motors the size
of a grain of sand is their tom-
mensurately puny power output*
The solution? A micro gearbox

- the one shown here was devel¬
oped at Sandia National Labora¬
tories - that increases the torque
(and proportionally reduces the
rpms) of a micromotor* This tech¬
nology opens up a wide range of
applications, from satellites to
surgical instruments*

- Mark Frauenf elder

□ z

WIRED MARCH 1998

IMAGE LEFT: SCOTT MENCHIN. IMAGE RIGHT; SANDIA NATIONAL LABORATORIES

Panasonic

just slightly ahead of our time* '

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Home Networks

+

On the Rise/
In Decline

o @

Ranking Life Expectancy
(Months)

The hot new way to attract venture capital is to
develop LANs for the home. Currently Tut Sys¬
tems and Epigram lead the pack with proprietary
schemes to run Ethernet over existing telephone
wire, and competitors are chomping at their
heels. Analysts say the 11 million US homes with

multiple PCs are proof of a burgeoning market,
but home LANs are really driven by the desire of
electronics manufacturers to get televisions and
DVD players onto the Net, While the technology
may be sound, does my TV really have anything
to say to my PC?

XML

© ©

XML, say breathless advocates of Extensible
Markup Language, will let us organize the Web,
Any sentence involving the Web and organiza¬
tion should give you pause: the two concepts are
incompatible, XML shows why. This standard
allows subject-specific tags so that, for example.

music reviews can be labeled <music-review>.
To find a review, search the Web for the tag. The
problem, of course, is that everyone must agree
to use the same tags, which is like saying all neti
zens must speak Esperanto - and about as likely
to happen.

Cable Modems

Observing the race between telcos and cable com¬
panies to deliver high-bandwidth connections to
the home is like watching a horse race between
two lazy nags. Who wins is less surprising than
that they even move. The most recent stumble of
progress was made by the cable companies, who

Juniper

© ©

Trepanation

Maybe itrs because everyone loves an underdog.
Or maybe it's just what happens when a firm is
led by a former sales and marketing executive.

In any case, Juniper Networks, an Internet router
start-up, has taken the vaporware prize of the
year: It has been showered with US$55 million

4- ©@

hype-list@wired.com

WIRED MARCH 1998

Like most trends, this seems to have started as
a joke. Trepanation - aka drilling a hole in your
head - was the province of conspiracy-theory
satirists, who melded talk of the Illuminati's third
eye with the virtues of brain aeration. But as
Umberto Eco so astutely comments, fringe fie-

managed to arrive at a cable modem standard.
That feat, according to the press, has catapulted
cable operators into the lead. Don't believe it.
The existence of a standard modem card doesn't
make me any more inclined to let the cable guy
open up my PC,

from investors like Nortel and UUNet, it's the
toast of the industry press, and marketingwise it
has Cisco on the run. Yet Juniper hasn't publicly
shown a half-working box. Of course, if the com¬
pany's smart, it will keep it that way. By now,
Juniper can only disappoint.

tion has a way of reinforcing fact, in the case of
trepanation, accounts are growing of actual peo¬
ple drilling actual holes in their skulls. Subjects
report a feeling of well-being, if not higher con¬
sciousness. Perhaps this comes from the sheer
relief of surviving acts of idiocy.

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IMAGE: LOU BEACH

THENETIZEN

The Special

Master

Man in the middle: Lessig is
poised to play a pivotal role in the
antitrust case of US v. Microsoft .

The court has ruled that Lawrence Lessig holds no anti-Microsoft bias.

But that doesn't mean that Bill Gates should rest easy.

Last December, when Judge Thomas Pcnfield Jackson
appointed Lawrence Lessig to serve as a “special
master” in the antitrust case of US u. Microsoft, the
news immediately plunged the quiet, 36-year-old Har¬
vard University law professor into the spotlight The
San Jose Mercury News called him “techno -savvy” The
New York Times deemed him “one of the leading intel¬
lectuals of his generation in American law” Microsoft’s
lawyers were less generous, arguing that Lessig should
be removed from the case for having shown “clear bias”
against the company.

Judge Jackson flatly rejected Microsoft’s bias claim,
giving Lessig until May 31 to investigate Microsoft’s
business practices and report “findings of fact and con¬
clusions of law” that the court will consider in making
a final ruling in the antitrust case. As special master,
Lessig has been invested with much of the authority of
a federal judge - including the power Lo issue subpoe¬
nas, gather testimony, and find parties in contempt.

Lessig’s report is likely to have a significant impact
on the destiny of Bill Gates’s US$150 billion software
empire. The philosophical differences between the two
men arc noteworthy - while Gates is famous for his
single-minded determination Lo consolidate Microsoft’s
market dominance, Lessig is best known for his efforts to

protect individual liberty by preserving the Internet’s
open architecture.

In his academic work, Lessig has considered three
types of regulation that govern life in cyberspace. The
first is law, “the most obvious regulatory constraint.”
The second is social norms - the informal rules of neti¬
quette that guide the Internet’s complex sociology. Lessig
believes these forms of regulation are optional because
they function as directives that one can choose not to
obey. But the same cannot be said for the third type of
regulation - technological constraints inscribed into the
Internet’s software architecture. As he wrote in this mag¬
azine last year, “Software code - more than law - defines
the true parameters of freedom in cyberspace ” (See
“Tyranny in the Infrastructure” Wired 5,07, page 9b,)

During the months ahead, Lessig may bring these
theories to hear in the Microsoft ease. As a law profes¬
sor, he proposed that “the question of what the architec¬
ture of cyberspace should be is not a neutral question.
Wc need to think about it in political terms,” Now, as
special master, he has been asked to resolve a thorny
political controversy: Which system of regulation best
serves the interests of cyberspace - Uncle Sam’s anti¬
trust laws, or Bill Gates’s operating-system code?

- Todd Lappin

□ 9

WIRED MARCH 1990

Fixing the Numbers

The Hacker Safe House

The Federal Communications Commission is taking steps to stamp out fun
and games - and perhaps illegal collusion - during spectrum auctions. In the
past, bidders occasionally signaled one another by submitting bids for extremely
specific amounts that could be decoded by matching each number with a corre¬
sponding letter on a telephone keypad- In most cases the messages were harm-
less. During a 1995 auction for 99 wireless phone licenses - which raised US$7.7
billion for the US Treasury - GTE was in a particularly tough battle with Sprint.

During one round GTE bid $47,248,363 -
i the last six digits of which spell "Bite Me,"
The FCC has long known that these mes¬
sages were flying around, but the agency never gave
them much attention until it received a complaint last year from a losing bidder,
High Plains Wireless, that claimed some bids contained secret messages that
amounted to illegal collusion, The complaint prompted a formal investigation by
the FCC, which, in turn, prompted the Justice Department to open its own inves¬
tigation. Both inquiries are ongoing.

If the Feds adopt a strict interpretation of the law - which seems unlikely - any
coded message could be deemed illegal, forcing the government to reauction
dozens of licenses and delaying the delivery of wireless services to the public.

But while the investigation continues, the FCC hopes to head off any future prob¬
lems by simply changing the rules of the game - players in all future spectrum
auctions must submit bids in nice round numbers. - Mark Lewyn

On the sixth floor of an office building in
midtown Manhattan, the studio space of
Network Development Labs serves as an
after-hours playpen for 11 hackers who
have banded together to split the cost of
rent, utilities, and a T1 Internet connec¬
tion- Notwork also serves as a sort of safe
house - hackers from Amsterdam and
London have bedded down in the studio,
which has also been host to underground
luminaries Phiber Optik and Rernie Salt's
not a hostel," says Notwork member Ryan
Nelson. "But we've got lots of friends from
other places who prefer a crash pad with
a T1 to a US$140 hotel." - Ben Greenman

Privacy Imperfect

In the summer of 1996 Internet users raised
a ruckus after learning that the P-Trak
service run by Lexis-Nexis was selling indi¬
viduals7 Social Security numbers, addresses,
and unlisted phone numbers. The outcry
prompted members of Congress to consider
legislation that would prevent credit bureaus
from selling such information to lookup
services such as P-Trak. Instead, Federal
Trade Commission chair Robert Pitofsky
persuaded a lew key senators to accept his
mantra that “voluntary regulation by indus¬
tries works best”

In December Pitofsky unveiled an agree¬
ment among the government, lookup ser¬
vices, and credit bureaus. Among the 14
parties to the agreement, three major credit
bureaus and two “information brokers”
have been previously cited by the FTC for
violating consumer regulations, while three
of the lookup service operators have been
caught violating the ethical guidelines of

the Direct Marketing Association.

The new plan establishes a set of
self-regulation principles that will be
monitored by independent auditors.

Critics charge that the proposals don't
go nearly far enough to protect individual
privacy, CrediL bureaus can still sell person¬
al information obtained from credit reports.
On the other hand, the plan requires the
services to provide marketers only limited
access to sensitive information, to certify
that certain “qualified subscribers” - like
law enforcement agencies and private
investigators - use the information only for
“appropriate uses ” and to deny the gener¬
al public access. The agreement also gives
consumers the opportunity to have personal
data removed from the databases, all hough
in practice it provides no way to find out
which services maintain the information,
or how to get in touch with them.

- Robert Ellis Smith

mm. me

iiliMU M fc i

\

WIRED MARCH 1998

□ OD

IMAGES fFROM TO P LEFT): SCOTT MENCHINj KLAUS 5CHOEWWIESE; LBU BEACH

©

Mergers ^Consolidations

After helping to defeat the CDA, grassroots activists may
become victims of their own success. By Rebecca Vesely

According to Jon Lebkowsky, cofounder of EFF-
Austin, the Supreme Court’s decision to strike
down the Communications Decency Act was great
for the Internet, but horrible for his seven-year- old
activist organization. “After the CDA decision, there
wasn't a lot of energy for EFF-Austm/ Lebkovrsky
says. “Grassroots organizations are strongest when
there is a demon defined”

The CDA challenge marked the first time that
civil liberties activists used the Internet to reach
the public, and their success provided an impres¬
sive demonstration of the medium’s political
potential. Online demonstrations, such as the
Paint the Web Black effort of
1995, were simple, cheap, and
extremely effective. But today,
as Internet issues like privacy,
security, and content control
move into the mainstream,
many small online groups feel
that large organizations like the
ACLU have taken over their
niche. “In the post- CDA world,
our role is to gather informa¬
tion and do research, which can
then be used by larger groups
that can afford to file expensive legal cases ” says
Bennett Haselton, founder of Feacefire, an online
activist group for minors.

Last year Haselton, a Vanderbilt University stu¬
dent, revealed that Cybersitter, a popular Internet
filtering program, blocked access to such sites as
Mother Jones magazine, the National Organization
for Women, and organizations for gay and lesbian
youths- “Bennett is a good example of the effec¬
tiveness of grassroots organizing ” says Jonah
Seiger, an Internet consultant and former com¬
munications director for the well-heeled Center
for Democracy and Technology in Washington, DC.
“We wouldn't be having a debate over blocking
software if it wasn’t for Bennett”

The White House’s new hands-off approach
to the Net has only made things worse for small
groups by intensifying the struggle to garner sup¬
port. “Apathy is rampant,” says Scott Brower,
executive director of EFFlorida, which, like EFF-
Austin, is not affiliated with the better-known San

Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“People are happy to hear we are doing this work,
but when it comes to getting them to volunteer,
it’s difficult to get anyone to commit ”

The groups that have done the best in the post-
CDA climate are those that have honed in on a
single, high-profile topic. NetActiom a two-person
activist shop in Northern California, now focuses
primarily on its campaign to “stop Microsoft from
seizing control of cyberspace.” Sun Microsystems,
one of Microsoft’s chief nemeses, gave NetAction
an undisclosed sum of money Iasi fall.

But most other grassroots groups do not have
corporate sponsors, “We chose not to seek corpo¬
rate dollars, because we did not feel we could
compete with Washington insiders ” says Shahbir
J, Safdar, founder and advisory board member of
the New York-based Voters Telecommunications
Watch. In December Safdar stepped down as head
of VTW to start an Internet consulting firm in
Washington, DC, leaving the future of VTW hang¬
ing in the balance. And some activists complain
that foundations consistently reject funding pro¬
posals from small groups and that most grant
money for online activism is directed toward proj¬
ects that help disseminate internet technology.

Although money is definitely an issue for the
small groups, the nature of online activism keeps
costs low, “The Web server is our only expense,
and til at costs about a dollar a day,” says Peace-
lire’s Haselton. EFF-Austin supported itself for
years on T-shirt sales and special book-signing
parties by cofounder and SF author Bruce Ster¬
ling* Anti, as for all the paperwork needed to get
nonprofit status for tax deductions, most haven’t
gotten around to it.

When another big free-speech fight comes
around, grassroots groups say they will be ready.
But for n ow, many are looking for ways to consol¬
idate resources. In January, EFF-Austin decided to
change its name to EF-Texas, in hopes of attract¬
ing activists from other parts of the Lone Star State.
“It’s tough/ says Lebkowsky. “Getting these guys
together is like trying to organize anarchists ” ■ a e

Rebecca Vesely (rebv@ix.nelcom.com) wrote u The
Generation Gap” in Wired 5.10.

As large, professional
groups move to the
forefront, smaller
online organizations
are struggling to
cope with rampant
user apathy and a
new range of cyber
rights issues.

“A few years back,
we had Internet issues
all to ourselves/1 says
Jon Lebkowsky of
EF-Texas/'But today
the environment for
online activism has
become saturated/1

□on

WIRED MARCH 1998

o

Mr.O Connel Goes to Concord

To understand who really has clout in
the political world, follow the money-
Marcus O’Connell, a financial analyst in
Concord, California, heard rumors that
property developers were giving large

sums of cash to members of the
city council, but when he visited
city hall to check the contribu¬
tion records, he found a handful
of documents stuffed in a binder,
“We needed a database” O'Con¬
nell says. “It's the only way to
make sense of all the different
entries”

Inspired, O'Connell became
the first private citizen in the
United States tci compile a data¬
base of local campaign contributions and
post it on the Web {pwp.value.net/maFcus
/campjinf). Other such resources exist in
cyberspace, but they mostly concern state
and federal campaigns and are produced
by experts at nonprofit organizations,
O’Ctmn ell’s effort was a one-man job.

created with Excel spreadsheet software
to shed a little light on politics in his
hometown.

O'Connell’s number crunching has
shown that members of the Concord City
Council have long been accepting heavy-
duty contributions From local developers,
sanitation companies, and lawyers. His
most eye-opening revelation was the dis¬
closure that since 1995, Bill Graham Pre¬
sents, a national concert promoter, has
sidestepped contribution caps and Tun¬
neled more than US$11,000 to council
members through company employees
who made some 27 separate donations.
Coincidentally, the council recently
approved a costly overhaul of the Concord
Pavilion, a lavish, city-owrned outdoor
amphitheater and concert venue,

O’Connell hopes the Net can put voters
hack iu the game by giving them until-
lered access to information, “We have the
capability now,” O’Connell points out
“IPs in our hands” - David Lazarus

Pirates Beware

Next time, think twice before you
copy that floppy. On December 1 6,
President Clinton signed the No
Electronic Theft Act, a measure
sponsored by Representative Bob
Goodlatte (RVirginia) that crimi¬
nalizes the unauthorized "repro¬
duction or distribution" of computer
software, books, musical recordings,
or videos worth at least US$1,000,
Designed to dose a loophofe that
may have legalized noncommercial
duplication of copyrighted material,
the new law targets "any person
who infringes copyright willfully/
with criminal penalties that range
from fines to six years in prison.

* Todd Lappin

Maximum Copyright, Minimum use

WIRED MARCH 1 9 9 B

Overprotective digital-copyright rules, much like the ones that were proposed and
rejected at a December 1996 diplomatic conference in Geneva, have resurfaced in
the European Community's latest plan to implement the World Intellectual Property
Organization Copyright Treaty. Under the proposals, nations of the European Union would
be required to treat almost all temporary and indirect copies of copyrighted works in
digital form as "reproductions" subject to copyright regulation. In addition, the legislation
would curtail the authority of EU nations to enact or maintain fair or private-use privileges
in their national laws, The measure also contains a byzantine provision that would outlaw
many legitimate technologies that have incidental infringement-enabling uses.

This may be good news for US high tech companies, as the EC's overzealous copyright
proposals could strangle Europe's nascent high technology industry. On the other hand,
if copyright maximalism prevails in Europe, Clinton administration officials may try to
resurrect similar legislation that has been stalled in Congress for the fast two years. For¬
tunately, Senator John Ashcroft (R-Missouri) and Representatives Rick Boucher (O-Virginla}
and Tom Campbell (R-California) have introduced legislation in Congress that is far more
enlightened and balanced - in the form of S 1 146 and HR 3048. Meanwhile, the European
proposal may improve when it's reviewed by the European Parliament and the European
Council of Ministers, particularly if opponents lobby for changes along the lines of the
As he roft- Bo u c he r -C a m p be 1 1 b i i I s. - Pam eia Samu eison

QoQ

IMAGE TQP LEFT- MICHAEL SEXTON, BELOW: SCOTT MENCHIN

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ENCYCLOPEDIA

NEW ECONOMY

By John Browning and Spencer Reiss

So what is the new economy?

When we talk about the new economy, we’re talking about a world in
which people work with their brains instead of their hands. A world
in which communications technology creates global competition -
not just for running shoes and laptop computers, but also for bank
loans and other services that can’t be packed into a crate and
shipped. A world in which innovation is more important than mass
production. A world in which investment buys new concepts or the
means to create them, rather than new machines. A world in which
rapid change is a constant. A world at least as different from what
came before it as the industrial age was from its agricultural pre¬
decessor. A world so different its emergence can only be described
as a revolution.

Q o Ef

WIRED MARCH 1998

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ENCYCLOPEDIA ov the NEW ECONOMY

Free markets are central to it. The Soviet
Union's collapse settled the debate between
market economies and planned ones. But
simply to say that the new economy is about
the unprecedented power of global markets
to innovate, to create new wealth, and to dis¬
tribute it more fairly is to miss the most inter¬
esting part of the story. Markets themselves
are changing profoundly. To understand that,
start by examining the mystery of Microsoft.

The fact that Bill Gates is the world's richest
man belies a huge shift in the values of capi¬
talism. Microsoft has annual sales of US$11
billion, and most of its assets walk in and out
of the doors wearing T-shirts. Vet the stock
market values the company at well over $150
billion - far more than either IBM (sales $76
billion, market cap $100 billion) or General
Motors (sales $160 billion, market cap $50
billion). Why? Because the rules of competi¬
tion are changing to favor companies like
Microsoft over paragons of the industrial age.

Microsoft’s rise is a testimony to the power
of ideas in the new economy. Working with
information is very different from working with
the steel and glass from which our grandpar¬
ents built their wealth.

Information is easier to produce and harder
to control than stuff you can drop on your
foot. For a start, computers can copy it and
ship it anywhere, almost instantly and almost
for free. Production and distribution, the basis
of industrial power, can increasingly be taken
for granted. Innovation and marketing are all.

So an information economy is more open -
it doesn't take a production line to compete,
just a good idea. But it’s also more competi¬
tive. Information is easy not just to duplicate,
but to replicate. Successful firms have to keep
innovating to keep ahead of copycats nipping
at their heels. The average size of companies
shrinks. New products and knockoffs alike
emerge in months rather than years, and mar¬
ket power is increasingly based on making

TnaTr?

sense of an overabundance of ideas rather than
rationing scarce material goods. Each added
connection to a network’s pool of knowledge
multiplies the value of the whole - one reason
for Microsoft's astonishing growth. The result:
new rules of competition, new sorts of organi¬
zation, new challenges for management.

Some zealots talk about a New Economy,
capital N, capital E, all too easily caricatured
as "there won't be inflation anymore, because
of technological change." Alas, as Stanford
economist Paul Romer has reminded us, “If a
majority of the Fed’s board of governors decided
to have 20 percent inflation, they could have it
in a year, possibly in months.” Then there’s the
idea that recessions are things of the past. This
comes up at the end of every expansion.

What's true is that the shift to an information
economy is redefining how we need to think
about both good times and bad. We don't know
how to measure this new economy, because
the productivity of a decisionmaker is harder
to grasp than the productivity of someone bolt¬
ing together cars. We don’t know how to man¬
age its companies, because decisionmakers
can’t be told what to do. We don’t know how
to compete in it, because information seeps
so easily that supermarkets now offer banking
services and Amazon.com has infiltrated its vir¬
tual bookshelves into Web sites the world over.
We don't know how to oversee it, or whether it
ultimately needs oversight at all.

A final thing we don't know is where - or how
- the revolution will end. We are building it
together, all of us, by the sum of our collective
choices. To help inform the architects of this
new world, we’ve assembled an Encyclopedia
of the New Economy. Part I starts here. Parts
II and III will follow in Wirecfs next two issues.
Read on, pioneer.

- John Browning

John Browning fjb^iopterxorni Is a Wired confrrdtJ^g editor based In
Loudon; Spencer Reiss is a senior editor M Wired. Additional reporting
by Kevin Meherand Mating! Kuruvifa.

WIRED MARCH 199

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IMAGE HIGE.L HOLMES

ENCYCLOPEDIA of the NEW ECONOMY

Adhocracy Organization without structure .

Adhocracies have long been used by creative enterprises -
film studios and ad agencies, for instance - to produce a
steady flow of differentiated products. They are a mirror
image of the well-defined bureaucracies that built most
industrial organizations; instead of a strict rule book, there
exists an evolving collection of shared goals. Start-up soft¬
ware companies are a classic example. Instead of fixed
tasks and job descriptions, everyone does what needs to
be done. Computer networks encourage adhocracy by
enabling people to continuously share information and
coordinate themselves informally.

Attention economy A marketplace based on the idea that
while information is essentially infinite, demand for it is
limited by the waking hours in a human day.

Attention economics has been around for at least as long
as there have been commercial media, whose true prod¬
ucts are not sitcoms (or magazines), but eyeballs for adver¬
tisers. Interactive media take this concept a step further;
they allow attention - say, a Web site's traffic - to be
bought, sold, or bartered and instantly shipped to other
sites anywhere in the world. And the whole business can be
scaled up to a billion people watching the Olympics or
down to a custom-tailored audience of you.

Attention economics helps explain some of the Net’s
seeming commercial anomalies, including the explosive
growth of high-visibility navigation sites like Yahoo! and
the proliferation of free (to the user) products and ser¬
vices. Another example is the skyrocketing value of bank¬
able sports, film, and TV stars who can catch eyes amid
the fray. In an ever more trafficked world, tools for get¬
ting (and keeping) attention will be increasingly valuable.

AT&T, breakup of The beginning of the end for old-fashioned
telecom monopolies and the first step toward truly global
data networks.

In January 1984 an antitrust agreement negotiated by
US federal judge Harold Greene forced what was then the
world's largest company to spin off the seven Baby Bells
and open the US long distance phone market to competi¬
tion. Starting with MCI and Sprint, the result has been
lower prices, better performance, and an explosion of

new companies and services, which continues today with
everything from digital cell phones and callback services
to low- Earth -orb it satellites and upstart Internet- based
networks such as WorldCom and Qwest.

AT&T's breakup reflects a fundamental change in think¬
ing about the nature of telecommunications. Traditional
cop per- wire -based telcos were seen as “natural" monopo¬
lies, endowed with insurmountable economies of scale.
But technological advances - from fiber-optic cable and
computerized switching to such mundane matters as auto¬
mated billing - have transformed telecom into a fluid,
increasingly global market.

Since 1984 more than 40 state-owned telcos around
the world have been privatized and opened to competi¬
tion. Sheer size still gives entrenched telecom giants for¬
midable clout. But prices for voice and data transmission
continue to plummet - a key to the new economy's growth.

Bailout, IMF Financial life support for developing countries
that overdose on free-flowing global capital
Since 1990 investors chasing double-digit annual returns
have poured more than $1.2 trillion into emerging- market
economies. But unreformed local banking systems have
often failed to keep pace, steering the new funds to politi¬
cal cronies and overhyped industrial projects. Eventually,
their currencies weaken, speculators attack, and loans
collapse. Then Lhe International Monetary Fund is called
to provide emergency financing, most recently the $100
billion-plus in rescue packages extended to South Korea
and other Asian “tigers" late last year.

The IMF, a staid central bankers’ club headquartered in
Washington, DC, worries about the risk to an increasingly
global economy of allowing even a second-rank economy
like Thailand's or Malaysia's to collapse. But critics say
that bailouts are themselves part of the problem, provid¬
ing a de facto safety net for Lhe big international banks
and encouraging more market-distorting bad lending.

Bandwidth A network's carrying capacity rarely sufficient.
The term bandwidth used to mean the size of the slice of
the radio spectrum available for a transmission. Today it
is mostly used to describe the rate at which information -
measured in bits of data per second - can move between
computers. As such, bandwidth determines a network's
ability to deliver information goods and services. But that
also makes it one of the new economy’s key limiting fac¬
tors - ask a Web surfer stuck with a 28. 8- Kbps modem,
or consider MTV pondering (in the near term, anyway)
online music videos.

Fiber-optic cable - currently being laid as fast as back-
hoes can dig trenches - and the late arrival of TV's deep-
pocketed cavalry are changing that. lhndit George Gil¬
der has proposed a bandwidth corollary of Moore's Law:
Backbone capacity will triple annually for the next quar¬
ter century. It could happen. Already, corporate Internet
users are measuring their access in gigabits per second -
sufficient to start realizing the trillion-dollar pipe dream
of TV and Internet convergence. Meanwhile, the $2 billion,

WIRED MARCH 1996

ENCYCLOPEDIA «.i Tns NEW ECONOMY

Denver-based telco Qwest is building From scratch a new
US network with a top capacity of 2 terabits (2 trillion bits)
per second - sufficient to transmit the entire contents of
the Library of Congress cross-country in 20 seconds*

The astonishing economies of fiber-optics have revived
- more quietly, this l ime - a version of the nuclear-power
industry's old slogan: bandwidth could someday be “too
cheap to meter” But for homes in particular, despite talk
of wireless solutions, there remains the "last mile” prob¬
lem of pulling fiber to individual customers* And then
there is a question that the old economy answered by Forc¬
ing regulated phone monopolies to provide universal ser¬
vice: Should everyone go to bandwidth heaven together?

Big Bang The birth of global financial markets.

On October 27, 1986, the London Stock Exchange followed
its New Yo rk co u n terpa rt a n d a b u 1 i shed fi xed co m m i ssi o n s
on share trading, setting up a free-for-all. What came to be
called the Big Bang also abolished internal market restric¬
tions and vacated its 100-year-old trading floor in favor of
a 11 -electronic operations.

Since then, deregulated trading has made markets more
efficient, more fluid, and more popular around the world.
The value of international shares traded on I he London
Exchange now totals more than £1 trillion (US$t,f> trillion)
annually - a third again more than its turnover in British
shares. Indeed, the growth of global financial trading has
been the most spectacular result of disembodied electronic
markets. The value of cross-border share and bond trading
has grown more Lhan 5,000-fnld since 1980, and $1,4 tril¬
lion worth of foreign exchange is traded through the world’s
computers each day. The result: a continuous global plebis¬
cite - not just on each company's business prospects, but
also on each government’s economic management.

Big Mac Index A streetwise aid tm tor of the comparative
value of major world currencies ,

Invented by the London-based magazine The Economist, the
Big Mac Index uses an edible icon of globalization as a kind
of new economy gold standard* Its basis is the price of the
signature McDonald’s hamburger, converted into US dol¬
lars. Because the fast- food giant’s production methods and
pricing policies are standardized worldwide, the operating

assumption is that month-Lo-month price differences from
country to country reflect local currencies getting out of
whack with fundamental costs and economic efficiencies.

Union Bank of Switzerland does a purchasing-power
version, comparing how long the average wage earner in
various countries needs to work to earn enough money to
buy a Big Mac. At the end of 1997, the longest time needed
was just under two hours, in Caracas, Venezuela; the short¬
est, in Tokyo, was nine minutes.

Bionomics Economies as ecosystems , not machines ,
Bionomics is a popular notion spanning a variety of new
economy concepts, including evolutionary economics and
complexity theory. Advanced by the Bionomics Institute,
based in San Rafael, California, its core idea is that indi¬
viduals, companies, and markets exist in a complex, adap¬
tive web, in which technological advance is analogous to
biological evolution.

Bloomberg "box”

Instant financial
news, analysis,
and real-time
numbers, on
demand 24
hours a day.

Bloomberg Th e i con of real-tim e fi na mi al info rmation .
Michael Bloomberg, a former top trader at what was then
Salomon Brothers, launched his New York-based private
company in 1981 - a proprietary electronic network featur¬
ing instantaneous data and complex analytics for markets
around the world. Along with competing versions from
Reuters and Dowt Jones Telerale, Bloomberg’s “box” - in
its latest incarnation, a sleek pair of LCD screens leased
by brokerage houses and banks for $1,160 a month - has
become both a vital tool for managing money and a cru¬
cial synapse in the global economy’s central nervous sys¬
tem, Meanwhile, Bloomberg itself, still privately held, has
grown into a $1 billion -a-year media giant, with tentacles
in television, radio, and the Web.

Brand 77m commercial equivalent of reputation.

Brands are guideposts for consumers wondering through
the new economy’s ever more bewildering blizzard of
choices. Long associated with ho-hum consumer prod¬
ucts, branding is an antidote to commoditized production
and brutal price competition. Even for behind-the-scenes
technology companies, the idea of so-called trustmarks
like “Intel Inside” may provide insurance against bolt-
from-tlie-bhie technological change (hello, IBM). Indeed,
some management theorists argue that brands should be
valued as an asset on corporate balance sheets - although
none have yet been able to answer the all-important ques¬
tion of exactly how to place a value on this asset*

WIRED MARCH 1 9 9 S

IMAGE BELOW. NIGEL HOLMES

I MACt ABOVE: J - P. ft INI 0 1 99B THE CARTOON BANK; [WAGE BELOW. MICHAEL NORTHROP

ENCYCLOPEDIA of the NEW ECONOMY

of the real world. But Lhe understanding they create may
support people's own instincts and judgments. Even if
they cannot predict prices, for example, traders hope that
a new breed of computer simulations may at least predict
when markets are heading for a bout of volatility*

Capital Stored value that can be used to produce more value.
In industrial economies, capital means machines or the
money to bny them* Today the term just as often means
knowledge, brands, intellectual property such as databases
and software, or even vaguer notions like social capital -
the trust that enables people to work together on a hand¬
shake rather than an expensively negotiated contract.

Electronic networks are fueling this process by increas¬
ing both the range of what can usefully be defined as capi¬
tal and the speed with which il can move* The more kinds
of capital there are - and the Taster it moves - the greater
the number of people who can share in the wealth. There
is another term for this: economic growth.

Capitalism A global economic system rooted in free enter¬
prise, private property and open markets; the way we all
do business now *

The heart of capitalism is a feedback mechanism, profit,
which rewards activities that people appreciate sufficiently
to pay for. Communism and even socialism lacked that, or
expressed it imperfectly. And as technologies have grown
more complex, capitalism's unparalleled ability to give
people what they want - to match supply wiLh demand
- has largely obliterated Us centrally planned rivals in
a roar of economic grow th*

Instead of socialism versus capitalism, the great debates
of the 21st century are likely to pit interpretations of capi¬
talism against one another* indeed, battle lines are already
being drawn - over trade, intellectual property, and equal
access to technology.

Chaos theory Ways to extract signals from noise.

No equations can predict the growth of an oak tree - or, in
the classic example, whether a butterfly flapping its wings
can cause a storm a month later and 10,000 miles away.
But computers can simulate such phenomena nonetheless
by starting from a few simple rules that describe a process
and then applying them thousands or millions of times.

Researchers are using this insight - and powerful com¬
puters - to understand everything from foreign- exchange
markets to the movement of crowds. The models are not
great at prediction. Even when the rules are understood,
it’s hard to capture all Lhe factors that affect the evolution

Churn Oust omer d isloyalty

Ever faster innovation means more possibilities for cus¬
tomers to decide they doiTt really like your product after
all - or to realize that someone else has a cheaper, faster,
or better version* And the new economy’s ever more
efficient markets make it less costly - in money, time, or
both - for consumers to make the move.

AOL learned all about churn when it developed a
busy- signal problem late in 1906 and tens of thousands
of expensively acquired customers bolted to less-popular
rivals. Long distance phone services and credit card com¬
panies encourage defectors by spewing millions of pieces
of junk mail - and, more recently, Internet banner ads -
offering everything from reduced rates and frequent- flier
miles to cash*

Internet retailing looks to be churn’s next great frontier*
Ecommerce pioneers are responding with new ways to
build customer loyalty - personalized service, for example*
But aggregators like Yahoo! and Excite make it pathetically
easy to click from one e-shop to another - even as loca¬
tion, store layout, and other traditional tools for building
competitive advantage vanish*

Commoditization The process by which the complex and the
difficult become simple and easy - so simple and easy that
anybody can do them * and does.

Commoditization is a natural outcome of competition and
technological advance: people learn better ways to make
things and how to do so cheaper and faster. Prices plunge
and essential differences vanish - look at cheap PCs or
mass-market consumer electronics*

The new economy puts commoditization into over¬
drive, speeding the flows of information, component
parts, and finished products to the point where products
can progress from idea to commodity seemingly over¬
night. The only real antidotes are barriers to entry -

WIRED MARCH 1928

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ENCYCLOPEDIA or toe NEW ECONOMY

say, a niche market too small to attract big competition.

Or innovation sufficiently rapid to stay ahead of the pack.
Or - if technology itself doesn't conspire to undermine it
- an old-fashioned monopoly.

Community Aggregated people.

In the physical world, communities are typically groups of
people - a town, for instance - held together despite their
d i ffe re n ces. V i rtu a I c 0111 m u n i 1 1 es a re d i H e re n t : t h ey 1 're
people held together by their similarities. The members
of, say, a chat group about the TV show Friends are all
interested in that subject and “talk" only about it. Rarely
does anyone discover the things over which they differ.

15 nt that same homogeneity gives virtual communities
immense (though still mainly potential) economic clout.
They bring likely customers together in one place, cheaply
and easily - not a bad definition of a market. And, for con¬
sumers, they provide free help and service, along with
valuable purchasing, market research, and R&D advice.

One problem is that virtual communities aren’t bound
together very tightly - no one even knows youTe leaving.
And there are too many other places to go if the one you’re
in starts unraveling.

Complexity theory The study of how and why targe systems
behave in ways unexplainable by the sum of their parts .
Free markets are probably the best example of complex
adaptive systems, as they’re known by researchers at
places like New Mexico's Santa Fe Institute. Players pur¬
sue nothing more than their own gain and interests. Yet
the result - in theory - is the fairest possible distribution
of goods and resources. Indeed, much of today's economics

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is the practical study of these properties - figuring out
wThen wre can trust markets to produce fairness and when
we need government to intervene.

Complexity theory, which originated in the study of nat¬
ural environments, also helps explain howT feedback loops
can cause systems to stall. Whether it's outdated telecom
restrictions or billion-doliar food subsidies, it's as easy to
create vicious cycles as virtuous ones. The good news is
that by helping to recognize the myriad ways in which sys¬
tems can unintentionally screw up, complexity theory pro¬
vides new tools for fixing them - and creates new respect
for the ways they can unintentionally succeed.

Coopetition Coopera don b et w ee n comp et i to rs.

Altruism doesn't have to be the opposite of self-interest.
Sometimes - when trying to create a new market or hedge
the risks oF an expensive innovation - it can he a way to
get what you want.

Coopetition - alliance, in tin1 ease of uoncompetitors
- is especially common in the computer industry, where
consumers want to know in advance that a broad range
o f com pan i es wi 1 1 sn p po Ft a gi v e n te ch not Qgy. Companies
cooperating helps such markets grow fasLer, without
requiring prolonged periods lo shake ouL competing tech¬
nologies. 1l also helps focus scarce resources - though not
necessarily on what is ultimately the best technology.

Coopetition often involves companies agreeing not Lo
battle in one market even as they fight like dogs in others:
witness the current “grand alliance” of Sun, JEM, Apple,
and Netscape, which is supporting the open programming
language .lava to undermine Microsoft's market power.
More commonly, companies will compete on actual prod¬
ucts even as they cooperate on technical standards, sacri¬
ficing a degree of independence to increase the odds of
success for the technology as a whole. Look at the huge
success of American Airlines in opening its Sabre reser¬
vation system to competing carriers.

Needless to say, coopetition makes antitrust authorities
nervous. There is an old-fashioned word for competitors
who agree not to compete - cartel , with its overtures of

Convergence Bits are bits -

It’s the quintessential new economy idea: translate every¬
thing, from Seinfeld to your kid’s homework, into the digi¬
tized Is and Os of computer language, then make it all
available anywhere in the world via Lhe Net. Rig dollars
are already being wagered on the prospect nTTV and PC
convergence - lhe idea LhaL the two most powerful devices
of the late 20th century can he merged into a single seam¬
less information system. (Oh. and throw in the telephone,
too.) It is a mesmerizing vision with profound ramifica¬
tions for the corporate media landscape of the not-too-
distant future. Stay tuned.

WIRED MARCH 1998

IMAGE ABOVE: ROBERT MANKOFF © 199B THE CARTOON BANK; IMAGE BELOW: MICHAEL NORTHROP

IMAGE ABOVE: NIGEL HOLMES: IMAGE BELOW. JACK ZIEGLER C 1997 THE NEW YORKER COLLECTION

ENCYCLOPEDIA or the NEW ECONOMY

price fixing. Today’s regulators appreciate the theoretical
advantages of coo petition, but in practice they still want
to be sure that they can distinguish it from old-fashioned
collusion. And as Microsoft's on-again, off-again antitrust
investigation shows, separating new ways of doing things
right from old ways of doing things wrong is far from easy.

Cycle time How long it takes to bring a new product to
market or to upgrade an existing one .

Prior to the industrial revolution, cycle times could often
be measured in centuries. They've been declining ever
since, pulled along by ever larger and ever hungrier mar¬
kets and pushed by increasingly supple technology. Detroit

Cycle Times for Key Products

Automobile Japan, 199CK5 years

J Hardware microprocessors 18 months
Software Internet browsers 9 months
Web site average start-up time 3 months

Automobile US. 1970s ID years

to help them keep an eye on what workers are up to
(including who's wasting time playing Quake). But decen¬
tralized managers also face a novel question: To what
extent can they still consider themselves to be in chaTge?

Deflation Falling prices ♦

Some otherwise reasonable people worry that the ever
more efficient new economy will bury us in an avalanche
of goods - a global glut. Their fear is a replay of the 1930s:
tumbling prices, vaporized profits, supply running far
ahead of demand.

Deflation is indeed happening in a few markets - look
at the price of computer chips or long distance phone
calls. Bui the price of many other things is definitely not
falling (Silicon Valley real estate, for starters). The price
of the average ear is stable or even rising - though what
you get is a vastly superior product.

What technology undeniably has done is raise the speed
of innovation in the economy. That means certain indus¬
tries will suddenly find themselves faced with falling prices
and slumping demand - not because the whole economy is
going into a deflation-induced slump, but simply because
somebody else has come up with products and services
that people would prefer to buy. It's unhappy for anyone
on the downside of an innovation cycle. But far from crip¬
pling the economy, that sort of change Is precisely what
produces continued innovation and grow-th.

automakers could stretch a basic model change over a
decade; competition from the swifter Japanese changed
Lhat. Today exhausted Web developers talk about “Internet
Lime ” where the cycle time gets close to zero - essentially,
nonstop continuous change and innovation*

Data mining Extra ding kn owledge from mformatio n .

The combination of fast computers, cheap storage, and
better communication makes it easier by the day to tease
useful information out of everything from supermarket
buying patterns to credit histories. For c level' marketeers,
that knowledge can be worth as much as the stuff real
miners dig from the ground.

More than 95 percent of US companies now use some
form of data mining - often nothing more than mailing
lists, but increasingly the more sophisticated psycho-
graphic profiles of potential customers that make privacy
advocates shake, it’s a perfect hot -button political issue:
Whose data is it, anyway?

Decentralization Decisionmaking moved from the center
of an organization to the edges .

What do you expect wrhen companies give every employee
a computer, a telephone, and an Internet connection?

Decentralization is an inevitable consequence of an
information economy, where communications and pro¬
cessing power are cheap, time is short, and enterprises
span the globe. And that means empowering decision¬
makers down to the lowest level.

Managers count on those same information networks

Deregulation What happens when governments have to
compete for capital and labor.

Opening up telecom to competition helped kick-start the
new economy. And as the resulting economies become ever
more fluid, government intervention in economic processes
- or the lack of it - is becoming simply another factor of
production, in Waiter Wriston's famous phrase, “Money
goes where it is wanted and stays where it is well treated "
So, bureaucrats be warned: Regulate at your peril.

Digital signatures The life blood of electro nic co mmerce a nd
citizenship.

Digital signatures - John Hancocks for electronic docu¬
ments - are a key tool in making cyberspace a place where

WIRED MARCH 1 9 9 S

ENCYCLOPEDIA oi NEW ECONOMY

people can do things besides hunt down information. Like
I heir pen-and-ink counterparts, they establish identity and
so can also be used to establish legal responsibility. Unlike
real-world signatures* they can also establish the complete
authenticity of whatever they are affixed to - in effect* cre¬
ating a tamper-proof seal.

Governments from Germany to Utah have given digital
signatures at least the same legal status as the paper kind.
But electronic autographs have also become embroiled in
Ihe general cryptography debate. Security services don’t
want people - criminals, to be specific - using strong
crypto. Unfortunately, Ihe same technology is also needed
to create forgery- proof signatures. And so far - at least in
the United States - the police aren’t giving ground.

Discontinuity Change so all-encompassing that it transforms
even the standards by which change is measured .
Discontinuities are bolts from the blue - most often tech¬
nological, but sometimes social or political (wars* for
instance). Sudden shifts in the competitive landscape are
not unique to the new economy - ask your local horse-
and-buggy salesman. But accelerating innovation makes
them more frequent - and* for those In the corporate
trenches, sometimes more dramatic.

The challenge for companies is to adapt - many don’t.

In a famous example* US railroads failed to realize that
their real business was something bigger - transportation.
They got trashed by the introduction of long distance truck¬
ing. A more recent example: Microsoft’s (near) dismissal
of a technological Hash in the pan called the Internet.

Diseconomies of scale Too many cooks spoil the broth ,.

In in fo rma lion wo r k, b e i tig b i g a n d m u sc) e b o u n d o ft e n
means rising production costs and falling productivity,
Fred Brooks, now a professor at Lhe University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, first documented the phenome¬
non when he analyzed the development disaster that
became IBM’s breakthrough operating system. OS/560.
Brooks, who was in charge of Lhe project, found that the
more people he put on the project, the more it lagged
behind schedule, WiLh hindsight he realized that trying to
bring the newcomers up lo speed Look more time and
effort than they could contribute to the project - not to
mention exacerbating the eon fusion caused by ever-
lengthening chains of communication.

Bill Gales has read Brooks’s book. The Mythical Man-
Month, That’s why Microsoft, for all the billions of dollars
in its war chest* keeps its development teams smalt.

D i s i nte r m e d i at i o n Cutting out th e m iddlema n.

As networks connect everybody to everybody else, they
increase the opportunities for shortcuts. When you can
connect straight from your desktop to the computer of
your broker or bank* stockbrokers and bank tellers start
to look like overpriced terminal devices.

Disintermediation first gained momentum in financial
markets when customers began forsaking savings banks
for their stockbrokers’ money market accounts - denying

banks the opportunity to make a nice return by investing
the funds in money markets themselves. Now entire swaths
of the economy are vulnerable: stockbrokers* real estate
agents, anybody who picks tip a phone for a living. And
maybe generic clothing stores* computer resellers, ami
record shops, too - thanks in part to the cheap, conve¬
nient* and increasingly universal distribution networks
otherwise known as FedEx and UPS.

In practice, rhough, disintermediation more often means
changing jobs* not eliminating them. And, in the process*
it can create opportunities for new and different middle-
men - look at online bookseller Amazon.com and stealth
retailers like CUC International. As networks turn increas¬
ingly mass-market* everyone involved in sales is playing
a duck-and-weave game of disintermediation and reinter¬
media lion. To the winner go the customer relationships.

Distributed systems Cooperation by another name.
Distributed systems originated in llie computer industry*
where - to the surprise of many - collections of medium -
powered computers sharing work often outperformed
even high-powered monolithic mainframes. Like decen¬
tralization, distributed systems work by putting decision¬

making where the information is, shortening chains of
command and speeding response. In doing so* they are
particularly well suited to very large applications - the
Internet, for instance, whose 91 million computers make
it by far the largest distributed system ever created.

Economies of time Faster is better
Being first to market brings huge advantage in an inform¬
ation economy. By learning your way of doing things,
customers make a mental investment in your product - a
powerful hold in an otherwise moMk frit Li on- free world.

More generally, markets based on weightless bits mov¬
ing at the speed of light tend lo reward quality rather than
mere quantity. As physicist Freeman Dyson has observed*
u Never sacrifice economies of time for economy of size."
Which is why even Microsoft worries about cycle time.

Farts II and U I o/ Wired ^ Encyclopedia of the New
ICconotny will appear in Wired 6M4 and a. 05.

WIRED MARCH 1958

IMAGE: NIGEL HOLMES

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ELECTROSPHERE

Cyberbeats

Forty years ago, the literary maelstrom

of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs

paved the way for the digital revolution.

By David Batstone

Allen Ginsberg told death to wait in line. He had
some unfinished business with the morality police.
Poet, pop star, political activist, spiritual avatar, all
crowded onto his resume. And here was Ginsberg, at
age 70, tying prone on his bed in San Francisco’s Hotel
Triton, delivering what would turn out to be his final
extended interview. Within four months, the congestive
heart failure Lhat had chronically ailed him would take
his life.

Ginsberg wheezed and coughed his way through a
retrospective of the Beat movement that surged through
the American literary1 scene in the 1950s, Other Beats
often dubbed him the great communicator of their ideal
of cultural freedom, but he spoke with a humility and
enthusiasm that would suggest lie was simply a fan.

At Ihe slightest mention of censorship, however, Gins¬
berg’s demeanor changed dramatically. He elbowed his
upper body erect off the hotel
mattress and breathed lire:

“The law infringes on my free
market, yet it’s the very1 free-
market bullshit artists that are
doing this. What hypocrites!”

Ginsberg was never one to
take restrictions on his free
expression lying down. In 1957,

US Customs Service agents
impounded his London-pub¬
lished poetry collection Howl
on charges of obscenity. The
ensuing court battle catapulted
the Beats off the pages of
obscure literary7 rags and into
the national spotlight.

An unrepentant Ginsberg maintained to the end that
state censorship degrades democracy. “IFs all about mind
and body control for the sake of power” he rasped, li is
legs now dangling over the edge of Lhe bed. “And today
the light continues over the Internet.”

The Beats and the digerati? The art of communication
sure brings together odd companions, Ginsberg’s link,
however, surpasses poetic hyperbole. While the Beats’
writing method and brazen lifestyle were deemed down¬
right quirky in the 1950s, the collective aesthetic of Jack
Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Michael
McClure, Ginsberg, and friends portends streams of
consciousness that emerge with remarkable clarity in
the digital age.

11 all starts, and ends, “on the road” Dean Moriarty
and Sal Paradise, the primary characters in Kerouac’s
legendary novel, search for something they can believe
in and, hell, all Lhe ecstasy and
transcendence they can stand
along lhe way. Kerouac places
Dean and Sal into full contact
with the unknown and unfa¬
miliar, and flashes of revela¬
tion appear to them from the
most unlikely sources. They
discover by trip’s end that the
mystery of the open road lies
not in any particular destina¬
tion, but the perennial drift
toward connection.

That message would fit com¬
fortably on the dust jacket of'
Sherryr Tu ride’s latest who - a re -
we -now treatise, Life on the

From Burroughs's kaleidoscope of vistas”
and Ginsberg's "many eyes" to Kerouac's
"language sea," streams of consciousness
now sweeping the planet started with the
Beat Generation.

WIRED MARCH 1998

□ 1 □

ORIGINAL IMAGES (FROM LEFT): CHRIS F E LV E ft/ A RC K I V E PHOTOS; TIM HALE/HETWAJ ARCHIVE PHOTOS

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Screen; Identity in the Age of the Internet.
The MIT professor tracks personal identity
in the digital age and concludes that we
invent who we are as wc move in and out
of social encounters and adapt to a variety
of social roles. We build a sense of reality
out of the associations we make. Turkic
identifies the Net as wa significant social
laboratory for experimenting with the con¬
structions ... of the self that characterize
postmodern life.”

Keraiac and Turkic write out of vastly
different social contexts, of course. Kerouac
was rebelling against a strongly imposed
view of the seif. Astute cultural critics of
die '50s depicted postwar America as a one-
dimensional society run by “organization
men” who produced mass culture For the
consumption of “lonely crowds" Any vari¬
ance from the conformity was akin to trea¬
son. “What is good for GM is good for
America" ran the slogan that dictated behav¬
ior ranging from die economic to the per¬
sonal. Kerouac and his peers challenged
that stability with their provocative tales of

self-discovery that openly violated sexual,
racial, and cultural mores.

In Turkic's postmodern world, many of
the institutions that once bound people
together - the bank on Main Street, a neigh¬
borhood church, a union hall - have now
become objects of nostalgia. The places we
meet others today, she writes, tend to he
much more transitional, offering services
and relationships that address small parts
of our lifestyles. The relationships wc build
in work, family, school, and neighborhood
overlap only slightly. Postmodern individ¬
uals endlessly recycle through communi¬
ties to which fragments of their identities
are bound.

In Life an the Screen, Turkic relates the
story of Gordon, a man who was raised
in two homes after his parents divorced
while he was still in grade school. He spent
winters with his mother in Florida and
summers with his father in California, and
Gordon was deeply hurl Lhat his mother
rented out his room whenever he went off
to California. His sense of displacement

continued after he went to college, only to
drop out a year later upon realizing that he
could succeed at computer programming
without a formal education. Turtle demon¬
strates how Gordon's role-playing in several
MUDs helped him find integrity and consis¬
tency in Lhe diverse “personae” he had been
simultaneously raised to be.

Likewise, Kerouac’s characters struggled
to find their individuality within Lhe invented
consensus of a mass culture. Hungering for
fresh sources of information, they slipped
into the worlds of others and began similar
role-playing experimentation. Hobos and
racial outcasts intrigued Kerouac, while
Ginsberg gravity Led toward sexual outlaws
and Burroughs befriended drug addicts and
criminals. Raised in middle-class malaise,
these writers desired to see a world that was
set Tree from control and conformity.

Inspired by the rawness of his encounters,
Kerouac changed bis writing method to
mirror the movement of time. Writing was
dead, he argued, once it was made to bow
before prescribed rules, narrow selectivity,

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punctuation, and revision. He wanted his
writing to “bop* as spontaneously as the
improvisational saxophone scat of Charlie
Parker or the action painting of Jackson
Pollock, Exhausting the forms of language
would give him, he hoped, new insights
into how the world might be reassembled,
He likened his writing method to “swim¬
ming in a language sea * an unintended
yet colorful description of hypertext for
a digital generation.

Starting with On the Road , Kerouac
recorded whatever impressions or memo¬
ries spilled out of his mind, deliberately
repressing his obsessions for finding the
“right” word or idea. His motto: first
thought, best thought. He quickly ran
inlo an obstacle, however. His how was
interrupted each time he had to feed a
new sheet of paper into the typewriter
To remain uninterrupted, he typed on long
rolls of teletype paper. Over the course of
only three days in 1953, he wrote The Sub¬
terraneans, a barely fictionalized account
of one of his love affairs.

Kerouac felt that he had stumbled on
“the only possible literature of the future*
and foresaw a day when the means of com¬
munication would facilitate not only sponta¬
neous prose, but a more immediate exchange
of ideas as well. While his insights are un¬
cannily prescient of the arrival of email,
at the time Kerouac could only imagine its
advent in science fiction terms, naming it
“space age prose ? “It may be they won’t be
reading anything else but spontaneous writ-
mg when they do get out there, the science
of language to fit the science of movement,”
Kerouac wrote.

To help Ginsberg and Burroughs appreci¬
ate his transformation as a writer, Kerouac
prepared a laundry list of attitudes and
techniques he considered essential for spon¬
taneous prose (see sidebar, page 122). One

pithy phrase captures the spirit of his list:
“Something you feel will find its own form ”
Kerouac’s “essentials* read tike a survival
manual for the denizens of electronically
mediated virtual communities. Cyberspace
pundit Allucquere Rosaline (Sandy) Stone,
in fact, suggests that success in online
encounters requires the ability to perform
“lucid dreaming in an awake state.” Stone,
who directs the University of Texas Advanced
Communication Technologies Laboratory,
thinks that people who participate in MUDs
and other simulated environments gain
interactive ways of processing information

that enhance perception in physical environ¬
ments as well. Their imaginations do not
stop firing once they leave their avatars.
Like the traveler who comes home from an
immersion in a foreign culture, the virtual

Kerouac's "essentials" for spontaneous prose
read like a survival manual for the denizens
of electronically mediated virtual communities.

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expatriate comes back to the real world with
new perspectives on what once was not only
too familiar, but also seemed incapable of
change*

Stone’s belief that MUDs permit the growth
of more fluid and dynamic personae resem¬
bles the “language of movement” Kerouac
once imagined. “The soul or some improba¬
ble avatar routinely travels free of the body,
and a certain amount of energy is routinely
expressed in managing the result of its trav¬
els ” comments Stone in. her hook The War
of Desire and Technology at the Close of the
Mechanical Age .

Tiie Beats, of course, turned to fiction
and poetry as their tools for creativity* Writ¬
ing gave them license tu blur lines and make
associations that bent Lhe rules of publicly
ordered social life* Connections that made
no sense (or were not allowed to exist) in
the real world took on a life of their own
in imaginary environments. Even when
their subject matter was autobiographical,
which it often was, the Beats usually danced
behind the masks of their characters and
tropes, Kerouac, for example, detailed in
each of his novels the names and places of
his daily encounters, yet freely fictionalized

brazenly claimed Lhat its words could have
worked just as easily in any order. His
description of the ideal presentation of the
book has more the feel of a Web page than
hard copy: “The hook spill off the page in all
directions, kaleidoscope of vistas, medley
of tunes and street noises, larts and riot
yipes and the slamming steel shutters of
commerce”

The Beats’ collective literary philosophy
evoked a furious backlash from many public
intellectuals. Nonnan Podhoretz delivered
one of the more biting critiques in his influ¬
ential Partisan Review essay, “The Know-
Nothing Bohemians” In effect, Podhoretz’s
diatribe resembles the kind of suspicion
that the print media today frequently direct
toward the Internet, Early last year, for
example. The New York Times cautioned
its readers: “Partly owing to tree-speech
protection, the Internet lacks a quality-
control mechanism to separate fact from
hyperbole or from outright falsehood ...”
Podhoretz, for his part, warned lhat the
Beats5 faith in human passion and celebra¬
tion of “incoherence” was sure lo lead to
m o ra t b ren k d o w n , p a rt i c n I a r 1 y a m o n g
America's you lit.

In 1959, Burroughs revealed the dark rationale

of one-way telepathic control:

"Power groups of the world frantically
cut lines of connection."

these slices of reality whenever it served the
movement of the story*

While other Beats followed Kerouac into
a spontaneous prose, Burroughs developed
a montage style of writing that he believed
more faithfully mirrored the process of
human perception than did representational
writing. Utilizing a crude cut-and- paste
method, he did not so much write a book as
design it. His stated goal wras to im pose nei¬
ther plot nor continuity, but splice together
as many images as possible simultaneously.

Burroughs was frustrated by the inherent
limitations of communicating information
solely through a two-dimensional sheet of
paper. He astonished readers with his pref¬
ace to his 1959 novel Naked Lunch , which

Podhoretz missed the subtlety of spon¬
taneous prose. buL be rightly sensed the
Beats' general suspicion of intellectualism.
While the industrial world touted empirical
reason as the sole path to the truths that
really matter, the Beats placed their trust
in the dawn of a new age that would value
intuition and imagination as equally crit¬
ical to the production of knowledge. They
believed that reason alone was incapable
of keeping pace with a world of rapidly
changing truths.

One thought logically following another
and centrally organized fit a mass consumer,
a mass media, and a mass political struc¬
ture. The Beats insisted that the new con¬
sciousness be discontinuous. They reveled

in chaos, where patterns emerge but last
no longer than the period for which they
are relevant or meaningful. If nothing is
fixed or permanent, creativity can run
amok. Keeping up with the flow of real ity,
then, demands constant awareness. Philip
Whalen, then Beat, writer and now Bud¬
dhist monk, succinctly articulated the spirit
of the Beats in his poem “Sourdough Moun¬
tain Lookout”:

What we see of the world is the mind’s

Invention and the mind

Th o ugh st a i ned by it , b eco m i ng

Rivers, sunt mute-dung, JUes -

Can shift instantly

A dirty bird in a square time

These “material-symbolic-psychic” con¬
nect i mis lie at the heart of Donna Haraway s
contemporary theories of technoscienrific
culture. Haraway, a professor in the History
of Consciousness program at the University
of California at Santa Cruz, shares the Beats'
passion to affect the language and concepts
upon which a worldwide web of relation¬
ships depend. Her ultimate interest is to
pursue “which connections matter, why, and
for whom?”

Haraway finds it ironic that tech noscience
has abrogated to itself the right to define
truths that are fixed and universal. The early
purveyors of the scientific revolution, to the
contrary, sought to make knowledge contin¬
gent oil experimentation so as to avert the
terrors of holy civil wars and arbitrary mon¬
arch s, But somewhere along the way facts
and self-evidence became the tools for a
m o d e r n fo rm o f m e n ta 1 ty r a n n y.

Haraway believes hypertext is a useful
metaphor for describing what really hap¬
pens in the production of knowledge. 1 n
her latest hook, Modest_Witness@Second
_M illennia/mFerna leMa n ©_Meets_ On co -
Mouse™, she spotlights the Mosaic browser
-as well as its offspring and competitors -
as a primary medium of global information
dispersion during the 1990s. She empha¬
sizes lhat the knowledge Mosaic represents
is vital for the distribution of valuable goods
like freedom, justice, well-being, wealth,
skill, and knowledge* “‘Computers5 cause
nothing” Haraway admits. “But the human
and nonhuman hybrids troped by the figure
of the information machine remake worlds.”

WIRED MARCH 1 9 & 8

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DIGITAL PHONES

Mosaiclike browsers provide Hie stage for¬
ma king hypertext and hypergraphic connec¬
tions* The actual results, however, depend
on daily negotiations* Pathways through the
Web therefore are not predetermined, but
are filled with agendas, conflicts, and partial
testimonies to diverse experiences* Haraway
suggests that despite our mystification of tech¬
nology, the most Important factors in the
information game - regardless of whether it
pertains to science or politics or both - are
the “enrollments” (who shows up) and the
“hybrids” they produce in their interaction*

The Buddhist notion of “emptiness”
which appears regularly in Beat writing,
is in many respects parallel to Kara way's
idea of hypertext. The ability' to simulate
and interact with the moment was in their
mind more important than calculation and
repetition of l ha l reality, "Emptiness Implies
a common space, yet not a common mind
with archetypes and messages running hack
and forth ” ex pi a i n ed Gins berg* “Just as th e
Internet represents a collective body of infor¬
mation, creativity is distributed throughout
the network”

Asked whether John Perry Barlow's depic¬
tion of the Net as “hardwiring the collective
consciousness” (see “A Globe, Clothing Itself
with a Brain ” Wired 3.06, page 108) might
resonate, Ginsberg deferred, “I I sounds like
Barlow may be trapped in some monotheis¬
tic hierarchization of consciousness: one
central repository, almost like a god, but in
this case more like a noosphere ” Ginsberg
then immediately rattled off a phrase from
a favorite poem, “There are no hierarchies,
only many eyes to he looked out of”

Given their historical context, the Beats
were ever wary of efforts to collectivize cre¬
ativity, be the motivation utopian or Fascist.
Many of the Beats found solace in Buddhism
for the very reason that ii offered channels
for linking the solitary mind to a deeper
consciousness of the universe, without caus¬
ing one to lose oneself in groupthink.

Limits on communications in 1950s
America reduced politics, reason, and ethics
to a narrow tedmoseientific project called
the Cold War. The web of secrecy ran from
the bedroom to the top of the government,
tightly regulating the kinds of intercourse that
were permitted in the private and public

spheres of society* In this claustrophobic
environment, the writings of the Beats
begged for candor about sexuality, politics,
drugs, and money.

Burroughs exposed the dark side of this
state regimentation in Naked Lunch , his
drug-soaked parody of social control. The
“Senders” are a scientific-industrial elite
who gather at a National Electronic Confer¬
ence in order to map out the future of the
social order* They pass a legal mandate
requiring every surgeon to install a minia¬
ture transmitter into the neural pathways
of the citizenry, so that subjects will send
messages of their internal feelings and
thoughts back to the State. But the Senders
decide that a citizen must never receive
a message, lest he “recharge himself by con¬
tact” Burroughs later reveals the Senders'
rationale for one-way telepathic control:
“Power groups of the world frantically cul
l ines of connection.”

Ginsberg was convinced l hat the struggle
for the free exchange of information was
Far from over in the digital age, “The key to
hierarchical power is the maintenance of
secrecy,” he rasped in a weak voice.

His remarks extended far beyond censor¬
ship to address the very exercise of political
power in the age of communications. After
four decades as a public artist, he had
reached the conclusion that the health of
a democratic society required open and
accessible information. “Why should we
have classified documents?” he wondered
aloud. “I’m happy for the government to
know everything about me as tong as 1 have
access to everything lhai is going on in their
lives and among their political alliances.”

Ginsberg claimed that such candor lay
at the very heart of what h meant to be a
“Beat.” While tons of ink have been spilled
trying to define the significance of the name,
he suggested that Kerouac got it best way
back in On the Road: “Everything belongs
to me because I am poor” mum

David Batstone (batstone@glnbaIeafe.com)
is a professor of social ethics at the Uni¬
versity of San Francisco. He is host and
executive producer o/BusStop RadioNet
Productions, broadcast weekly on National
Public Radio *

Kerouac's Essentials
of Spontaneous Prose

1 . Write on, cant change or go back, involuntary,
on revised, spontaneous, subconscious, pure

2* Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild type
written pages, for your own joy

3. Submissive to everything, open, listening

4. Be in love with your life every detail of it

5. Something that you feel will find its own form

6* Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind

7; Blow as deep as you want to blow

8* Write what you want bottomless from bottom
of the mind

9* The unspeakable visions of the individual

1 0. No time for poetry but exactly what it is

1 1 . Visionary tics shivering in the chest

1 2. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object
before you

13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical
inhibition

14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time

1 5* Telling the true story of the world in interior
monolog

1 6. Work from the pithy middle eye out, from
the jewel center of interest swimming in
language sea

1 7 * Acre pt 1 oss forever

1 8* Believe in the holy contour of life

1 9. Write in recollection and amazement of yourself

20. Profound struggle with pencil to sketch the
flow that already exists intact in mind

2 1 . Don't think of words when you stop but to
see picture better

22* No fear or shame in the dignity of your
experience, language, and knowledge

23. Write for the world to read and see your
exact pictures

24* In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman
Loneliness

25. Composing wild, undisciplined pure, coming
in from under, crazier the better

26. You're a Genius alt the time

2 7 . Writer- Di rector of Ea rthly Movies produced in
Heaven, different forms of the same Holy Gold

WIRED MARCH 1598

02H

Introducing AT&T WorldNet®

Virtual Private Network

Service

You decide who gets into your network and where they go from there.

You've heard the buzz about IP networking and the buzzwords: selective access, ft means
that now you can control who can get what information, how much - even who they can
share it with.

Using IP networking technology, AT&T Wo rid Net Virtual Private Network Service allows
you to create extranets and intranets on demand. To give employees, as well as customers
and suppliers, access to your network - without giving everyone the run of the place.

It's the best of all virtual worlds, because it’s flexible enough to accommodate the different
needs of everyone who uses your network. Meanwhile, you get the business-class networking
you'd expect from AT&T And the dependability of the AT&T backbone supporting every
aspect of your network. If that's the level of security you want, just get in touch with us.

Want to hear more? Call I 800 23 1-4 1 53, or visit www.att.com/worfdnet

t 1 s all within your reach.

PRESENTATIONS

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Bundled software lets you
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Online Synergy

Not to be confused with
Dmetics, L Ron Hub¬
bard's occultish work that
spawned Scientology, Syner¬
getics is the opposite of that
dlsinfo stream. The magnum
opus of the late ft. Buckmin¬
ster Fuller* it is nothing short
of an explorer's guide to the
workings of our universe.

Synergetics is a thorough
investigation into both physi¬
cal and nonphysical reality. ltJs
easily one of the most excep¬
tional books of this century.

However, Synergetics is now
long out of print. Fuller s estate

A Fuller comeback,

recently agreed to put both
volumes online, where virtual
communities have grown. It is
interpreted and explored; Kirby
timer's thriving Synergetics- L
mailing list is a prime example.

Fuller's Synergetics may not
be taught in schools anytime
soon, but the amorphous Net
is bringing his vital llfework to
the world. - Michael Stutz

Synergetics: Explorations in
the Geometry of Thinking, by
R, Buckminster Fuller; free,
Macmillan Publishing Com
pany: on the Web at www
semech. com/public/rwgray
/synergetics/synergetics, h tmi.

Age of Interpretation

Get ahold of Manuel Castells’s three-volume work. The Information
Age - a must-read with its more than 1,200 pages of fact-packed,
lucid prose. Castells explores the social significance of information
technology and examines the remapping of global geography in the
information age according to what he cafls “the space of flows* - not
location in space, not Lhe change of location, but a higher derivative
“location” of value based on the volume of traffic. Ye shall know them
by their email volume and their FedEx bills.

Castells is the intellectual heir to Hegel, Academics will be suspi¬
cious of him for his comprehensive reach. He’s read everything! But
ihese works, as he says, are not about books but about the world as
we are needing to reinterpret it. While volume one covers the com¬
munications technologies that are pulling us, globally, together, vol¬
ume two focuses on the forces that are pulling us apart: the identity

Street Cred

125

Just Quits Beta

Best

138

Deductible Junkets

no

Idees Fortes

142

What puzzles are posed by our transition to informationalfsm?

politics of feminists, environmentalists, anti ethnic “nationalists” of
various stripes. Volume three explores those who arc disenfranchised
by digital illiteracy - “the black holes of informational capitalism ”

Turning Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach oil its head (“The phi¬
losophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point,
however, is to change it” said Marx), Castells concludes his magnum
opus: “In the 20th century, philosophers have been trying to change the
world. In the 21st century, it is time for them to interpret it differently.”

Perhaps you’re at peace with an information society that privileges
the quick over the tired. But after this read, you may long for a new
edition of The Federalist Papers , one that addresses the questions of
justice in a way that lakes account of our leaving the agricultural and
industrial eras to inhabit an information age where delivering good
bits doesn't always add up to producing good, - Jay Ogilvy

The Information Age: Economy Society and Culture , by Manuel Castells: each volume
US$69.95. Blackwell Publishers: (800) 216 2522, on the Web at www.blackwellpub.com/,

H20

WIRED MARCH 1998

Video Effects

Back in Ye How

I n the winter of 1989, when

II Fox first aired The Simpsons
Christmas Special, I started
recording the shows, taking
care to cut out the commer¬
cials. Now, eight years later,

i have more than 36 tapes
of Simpsons episodes.
Unfortunately, all my work
has recently become moot.

Fox Home Entertainment has
released stx early Simpsons
episodes on video. Available
individually or as a boxed set
of three, each of The Best of the
Simpsons tapes contains a pair
of shows from the first year, as
well as an original short from
The Tracey Oilman Show ,

Homer at His best.

While you can see the show
every day, thanks to reruns,
the versions being shown in
syndication have a couple
minutes dipped out for more
commercials. Not so with these
videos; all the jokes are here.

With any tuck, there'll be
more of this series .There’s still
some great episodes worth
preserving. Like the one where
Bart cheats on an IQ test, or
the one in which Sideshow
Bob comes back to get his
revenge on Bart, or ♦ ♦♦

- Paul Seme!

The Best of the Simpsons:
US$9.98 each, 524.98 box
set. Fox Home Entertain^
ment+1 (310)369 3900.

f be constantly reported improvements to cyber arcades - all those
blinking lights and ever more realistic virtual worlds - may pro¬
vide a thrill for those of a certain age, but where’s a thinking adult to
find the deeper yet still awe-inspiring uses of new media? Cheek the
art world. Artist Bill Viola’s breathtaking 25-year retrospective is a
high tech In ii house for adults. It’s a darkened, dazzling labyrinth of
15 room -sized video installations that pulsate with large-screen pro¬
jections, slowly spinning mirrors, and brief thunderous sounds.

The electrical pyrotechnics wouldn’t do much without an artistic
intention, and, thankfully, Viola is as much a master of his medium
as he is a supreme content provider. During the course of his consis¬
tently interesting career, the Southern California- based artist has
explored the juicy realm of mortality and dreams - in mind-blowing
ways. Using surprising configurations of video and sound, Viola does
something amazing: lie penetrates l he barriers between objectivity
and subjectivity. In his 1988 piece The Sleep of Reason, for example,
he evokes a bedroom in which the sights and sounds of nightmares

Dynamic high tech content for life outside the video arcade,

briefly, and violently, take over actual space.

Time is also of the essence. In a number of works, Viola captures
feelings of loss, longing, and the fluidity of the moment. In the 1987
piece Passage, a 26-minute videotape of a child’s birthday party is
enlarged to wall scale in a small room and plays out over seven hours.
It may sound deadly dull, but in this artist’s masterful hands, the scene
becomes a haunting, looming memory of a long-lost event.

It’s also in the realm of time that the exhibition stretches the enter¬
tainment dollar. These durational pieces could lake days to see tn their
entirety (though abbreviated viewing provides powerful results), and
a concurrent, rather extensive program of Viola’s single-channel video¬
tapes extends the possibilities even further. But of course, quantity
isn’t everything. Viola offers plenty of material and presents it seam¬
lessly, and his images are so compelling they seem to etch themselves
into your mind. Just like those kids hanging out in the cyber arcade,
you’ll have to drag yourself away. - Glen Hdfand

' Bill Viola": through May 10 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; touring
internationally. Whitney Museum: + 1 (212) 570 3600.

Intel Insider

eading Inside Intel after Andy Grove's Only the
Paranoid Survive (see Wired 4.1 2, page 272) is
like living through an episode of Sliders. Both
hooks are ostensibly about the same world, but
there are important differences.

Grove's world is one in which hard-working
engineers slave away to constantly improve their
product while management safeguards their
greatest achievements from unscrupulous inter¬
lopers. Inside Intel portrays the same nerdy engi¬
neers slaving away, but the benevolent managers
have turned into robber barons, ready to grind
down an honest competitor or an employee.

AuthorTim Jackson details how a stopgap prod¬
uct line - the x86 series of processors - went on
to dominate the computer industry, setting the
standard and imposing unnecessary limitations.

There's more to Grove's world than meets the eye.

I had assumed that Intel's success was 80 per¬
cent engineering skill and 20 percent market
manipulation. I'm now inclined to revise the latter
number upwards, l expected to learn the nitty-
gritty of computer engineering. I've never under¬
stood what goes on inside a chip, but always
thought I ought to. Inside Intel does a credible
job explaining all that, but also details fraud,
manipulative and discriminatory employment
practices, plagiarism, and entrapment. That my
computer has Intel inside has as much to do with
these factors as with clock speeds and fab yields.

Most industry leaders have their share of dirty
laundryJackson does an admirable job of airing
Intel's in a fascinating yarn,- Jeffrey Mann

Inside Intel: Andy Grave and the Rise of the World's Most Power
ful Chip Companyl by Tim Jackson: US$24.95. Dutton: +1 (212)
366 2000,

WIRED MARCH 1998

020

Worlds Away

he slow pace and still-by-still graphics of Riven:

The Sequel to Myst may try the patience of
those who like their games punctuated by gun¬
fire* So think of Riven as cinema. Think of it as a
book. Because although it's not for everyone.
Cyan's offering blows away hyperviolent, visually
repetitive games.

Riven is gamemaking at its most audacious.
Visual and audio effects aside, the effort put into
making the experience intellectually immersive
is staggering. Because both the concept of Riven
and its technical execution are so inspired, devel¬
opers at Cyan seem to assume that you will play
until you go blind. And if you hope to finish, you
just might have to. The programmers have created
a civilization, and then dropped you, the unwit¬
ting player, into it. You can never be sure whether
a building is a temple, a control room, or a simple
shelter, because everything has larger cultural
significance, in one room, bronze beetles on the
wall snap open to reveal Byza mine-style religious

Riven's visual grace tempts players to further explorations.

scenes: a book falling from the sky; a messiah fig¬
ure casting his followers into an abyss. Acclimating
to Riven is like learning to read - you must learn
to synthesize the scattered symbolism of the
game into a useful visual alphabet.

And even if you were to grow tired of the pon¬
derous anthropology of the game, temptation is
enough to win the war against your impatience.
An enormous gold-domed observatory lies on
the other side of a locked bronze gate, overhead
walkways are just a few feet out of reach, and as
you stand on one cliff top, unexplored buildings
across the valley beckon through the haze, With=
its even pace, tireless perfectionism, and graceful
flourishes, Riven heralds the aesthetic conver¬
gence of multimedia, cinema, and literature. It's
a blockbuster and a page-turner rolled into one,
but because there's no running time or page
numbers. I'm still not sure how far I am from
finishing. - Jacob Ward

Riven: The Sequel to Myst: U5S5G, Red Orb Entertainment;

+1 (41 5) 382 4770. on the Web at www.riven.com/ .

Private Survey

If remarkably comprehensive and provocative collection of essays,
r Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape offers a penetrating
and informative analysis of the interactions and tensions between
information technology and privacy.

Edited by Philip Agre and Marc Rotenberg, this book provides a
framework for developing information systems. The authors featured
here are international experts in the technical, economic, and politi¬
cal aspects of privacy, Agre?s introductory material lends consider¬
able coherence to the book. Other essays include:

• Viktor Mayer- Schdnberger discusses four generations of data
protection in Europe; beginning with the early laws of the 1970s,
he moves on to a greater awareness of individual rights, and then to
a recognition of the right to informational self-determination, and
finally to some of today’s rather holistic approaches. This vital chap¬
ter shows Europe’s longtime awareness of privacy risks.

* Robert Gellman muses on the viability and effectiveness of our
privacy laws: “The problem is less a shortcoming of existing legal
devices and more a failure of interest, incentive, and enforcement.

If the will for better privacy rules develops, the law can provide a

way to accomplish the objectives.”

* In a very provocative chapter, Simon G. Davies reflects on tire
public interest and observes that privacy has been transformed from
a right into a commodity. He concludes that “the loss of traditional
privacy activism at a macro political level has imperiled an impor¬
tant facet of civil rights.”

■ David J. Phillips’s “Cryptography, Secrets, and the Structuring
of Trust" deals with a topic undergoing great flux, and thus is not so
current as the other chapters. Nevertheless, it presents a fresh per¬
spective. Discussion of the Clipper chip is historically interesting.

■ David H. Flaherty, who is Information and Privacy Commissioner
for British Columbia, considers the extent to which surveillance can
be controlled, even in surveillance- prone societies.

* Rohan Samara jiva’s “Interactivity as though Privacy Mattered”
concludes with this ominous warning: “Once coercive surveillance
becomes routinized and taken for granted, the prospects for privacy
and trust-conducive outcomes are likely to be dim”

- Peter G. Neumann

Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape, edited by Philip E, Agre and Marc Rote n berg;
US$25. The MIT Press: +1 (617) 625 8569,

Q2Q

Power Mike

elephone headsets are

great if you have to type
while you're on the phone.

And computer headsets are a
must if you want to use voice-
recognition software with
your desktop machine. And
stereo headsets are great for
listening to CDs ... having
three headsets on your desk
is a recipe for tang fed cords.

VXI has two answers, both
of which solve two-thirds of
the headset problem. Com¬
bine the Parrot 3 headset with
the company's Parrot Switch
telephone amplifier, and you've
got a headset that can work

Mighty headsets.

with either your telephone or
your computer, I use mine
every day,

VXI also makes the Parrot 2
stereo headset, which works
equally well for voice dictation
and listening to a CD through
your computer. Unfortunately
the Parrot 2 doesn't work with
the Parrot Switch - that's why
each headset solves only part
of the problem. Rut if you have
a computer that can-do tele¬
phony, you solve all three prob¬
lems,- Srmscjn Garfinke!

Parrot 3 headset: US$76;
Parrot Switch telephone
amplifier: $11 6, VXI Corp.;
(800) 742 8588,

WIRED MARCH 1998

Art as Science

Explosive Import

U eferring to Takeshi Kitano
If as Japan's leading actor-
director is like referring to
Mount Fuji as a rather steep
incline, Kitano is an entertain¬
ment phenomenon whose
versatility has earned him cult
status throughout Asia and
Europe, though curiously none
of his films have been released
in the US- until now.

Fireworks (Ham-BIj is an
appropriate title for this explo¬
sive drama of an embittered
excop who stages a bank heist
to compensate for his tack of
responsibility to a crippled
former colleague and his dying
wife, In his belated repentance,
he earns the wrath of yakuza

Kitano in the spotlight

loan sharks and the disbelief
of his former police colleagues.

Key to the film's brilliance
is the enigmatic Kitano, who
wrote and directed the film
while starring as Beat Takeshi.
As a filmmaker, Kitano creates
long, Zeniike passages pleas¬
antly void of dialog, then
savages the audience with
unexpected hursts of artful
violence. As an actor, he recalls
the golden age oF films, when
stars were truly stellar crea¬
tures. - Phil Haii

Fireworks (Ha no -81): opens in
Los Angeles and New York
In March and smaller venues
by April. Milestone Film: [800)
603 1104,

f your right and lefl brains are constantly at war, have them make
peace by delighting in On the Surface of Things , an art book for
science nerds and gadget heads - and, simultaneously, a science book
for artists and aesthetes.

This colorful volume features ravishing photographs shot by Felice
Frankel, a Guggenheim fellow, artist-in -residence, and research sci¬
entist at MIT. Frankel artfully renders scientific breakthroughs - from
DNA analysis to holographs - as mysterious, brightly hued images. Her
work conveys the profundity of scientific inventions and observations
in visual lyrics that intrigue the eye - and mind.

Her main goal as an artist -researcher is to find the aesthetic com¬
ponent of scientists' work to add to their documentation, without
changing the science. In the visually stunning 0/; the Surface of
Things, Frankel communicates an emotional response to scientific
discovery that cannot he fully captured in prose, by translating the
depth of these findings into a language we all understand: beauty.
Even those with no technical training can relate with raw enthusi¬
asm to silicon, etched by light or microelectrodcs, for example, as

Eye candy for the scientific at heart.

Frankel portrays them in images as alluring as the most gorgeous
abstract canvases by painters Richard Diebcnkorn or Frank Stella.

The words accompanying Frankel’s photographs, by Harvard chem¬
istry professor George M. Whitesides, arc equally moving. A para¬
graph published alongside an absolutely stunning magnified image
of otherwise unglamorous ferrofluid reads: “Pity the gryphon, the
mermaid, the silkic, the chimera: creatures assembled of incompat¬
ible parts, with uncertain allegiances and Troubled identities. When
nature calls, which nature is it? When instinct beckons, approach or
flee? A ferrofluid is a gryphon in the world of materials: part liquid,
part magnet ...”

Take it from me, someone who schizophrenically makes a Living
by both writing about and teaching college kids the virtues of art and
science: On the Surface of Things presents one of the year's more
intriguing concepts for ail art book (or is it a science hook?). It's a
rare yin and yang concoction that satisfies both sides of the brain.

- Heena Jana

On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science , by Felice Frankel and George M.
Whitesides: US $35, Chronicle Books: +1 {41 5] S3? 3730, on the Web at www.chronbooks.com/.

Software Pirates

he skewed swashbuckling adventure Ship -
wreckers! is one of those pure computer
games that makes no attempt to simulate reality
or offer a virtual version of anything. In the tradi¬
tion of desktop time-killers like Power Pete and
the original Castle Wolfenstein, it simply inserts
you in a series of wit-racking mazes filled with
enemies, obstacles, and power-ups and asks you
to find the exits.

The rules are old, but the props and scenery are
new. As a rogue pirate challenging the salty Cap¬
tain Blowfleet, you circumvent sea monsters and
dodge the droppings of brightly colored parrots.
Instead of saving the universe, you are encouraged
to pillage mercilessly. The goal is to find map frag¬
ments contained in floating bottles.

The game's appeal is in its detailed cuteness.

A low tech arsenal of cannonballs, roman candles,

Good olJ fashioned gaming on the high seas.

powder kegs, and roaring flame-throwers and
lightning bolts - my favorites - wages mayhem
in each of the five environments. Some worlds
are cluttered with icebergs, others are plagued
with tropical storms that cloud visibility.

If your ship is set on fire, tiny howling sailors in
red and white striped shirts will hop overboard
until the flames are extinguished. You can recoup
some of these losses by scooping them up before
they drown or become shark bait. Evidently, sail¬
ors aren't too picky about where they do their
swearing - you can also gain health by torching
Blowfleet's boats and scooping up its crews. It's
all peg legs, planks, and parrots here, a seafaring
escape from the usual videogame busywork of
exterminating radioactive mutants, deadly
viruses, and corporate conspiracies. - Ian Christe

Shipwreckersl for PC or PlayStation: US$54.99. Fsygnosis:

+1 [650) 287 6500ron the Web at www.psygnosis.com/ .

WIRED MARCH 1998

□ 20

If you abuse your credit cards, get used to this answer. Chances are it's the one
you'll hear when applying for car loans, apartments or anything else that requires a
check of your credit history. For more information on credit visit www.creditalk.com.

A message from MasterCard.

C 1997 MasterCaid UHernalKniai Inoorp&rai&d

Razing Arizona

t's just another day in Para¬
dise- Paradise, Arizona, that
is - and all the usual players
a re he re : wi rid o w-shop pers,
children, gas-station atten¬
dants. And of course there's
you, the individual known only
as the postal dude - the mis¬
understood 3-D sprite with the
trenchcoat,the perfectly calm
voice, and the assault rifle.

Welcome to Postal, a hybrid
Mac/PC CD-ROM tribute to
life in 1990s America, As the
inscrutable postal dude, you
begin the game outside your
front door, which you can't
open; there's a police car in
front of your house and lots of

No sense ringing twice,

men with guns in the street.

If the game rewarded intro¬
spection, you might be able to
determine the psychological
particulars that brought you
here, hut it doesn't, and your
best bet is to start shooting.

Your disturbed tittle postal
dude utters a constant stream
of witticisms amid the blood¬
sheds h, did that hurt?* he
inquires after shotgunning a
cop at point-blank range.
Sinister, eh? Wei l, consider this
chilling, observation :AiMn ail,
it's a pretty damned fun game.
- Chris Hudak

Postal. US$49. 95. Ripcord
Games: +1 [408)653 1897.

All Natural and Complex

agazines focusing rm the natural world are plentiful these days,
hut the quarterly Terra Nava towers above its competition, ll
refuses to define its mission in terms of a politically correct slant on
environmental activism, or on a rhapsodic, New Age romanticism.
Editor David Rothenberg and his ever-stimulating roster of writers
and photographers take the position that writing clearly about nature
requires a tough-minded commitment to notions of complexity and
contradiction.

Issues arc loosely organized around themes like Borderline and
Music from Nature. Liberated, for the most part. From political or spiri¬
tual agendas, Terra Nova’s writers offer multiple perspectives on how
nature’s dark and light sides have been interpreted cross-cult urally.
Borderline looks tinblinkingly at the false dualisms that often cloud
ecological debates. Animal life is not treated as something purer than
human, while pollution is viewed as a complicated swirl of linked
pluses and minuses.

The music issue includes a CD, bringing to life essays about music’s
roots in natural soundscapes. Of particular note arc excerpts from a
book by Japanese composer 'fom Takemitsu. Ills Zenlike appreciation

Term

i'NOVA

I /n -Ur fifjji/

Terra Nova : fitting into nature's constraints.

of direct experience of music in nature, undiluted by academic theory,
is summarized by the statement, “When sounds are possessed by ideas
instead of having their own identity, music suffers.” The mix of con¬
tributors puts most music magazines to shame. In what other publi¬
cation can you find Beethoven and Hildegard of Bingen, Brian Eno
and the BaRenzele Pygmies?

Terra Nova delights in presenting artists who relish working in a
time when virtuality and artificial life arc developing, who see new
technologies less as threats and more as opportunities for complex
artistic engagements intertwining naturalness/artificiality. No image
from the journal is more indicative of its vision than that of a piano
dropped from a mountain by an avant-garde composer. Don’t worry.
This is purely fiction, excerpted from Thomas Wharton’s novel Ice¬
fields . Rut Wharton offers an appropriately paradoxical, complex
conclusion to this performance art: “Ivory keys are found later in the
summer by hikers ... Often they are mistaken for the teeth of mam¬
moths” - Norman Weinstein

Terra Nova : US$34 yearly MIT Press Journals; +1 (61 7) 253 2889, fax +1 (61 7) 577 1 545, email
journak-orders@mit edu .

Media Odyssey

edia evolution, like biological evolution, is
no simple progression from prehistoric to
futuristic, but a patchwork of fits and starts - it's
mosaic. Paul Levinson takes this literally, kicking
off his ode to transformative technology, The Soft
Edge, with Moses' march down Mount Sinai.

Monotheism, it seems, failed to take hold in
ancient Egypt because the dominant medium -
hieroglyphics - could be mastered only by a rare¬
fied priesthood. The Hebrew lawgiver, on the
other hand, was blessed with a concise system
of writing conceived to facilitate commerce. The
rest, as they say, is history: the phonetic alphabet
begat increasingly distributed information - and
social transformation - by means of the printing
press, the wordprocessor,and the Internet.

Remarkable in both scholarly sweep and rhe¬
torical lyricism, this "natural history" spells out
how remedial technologies, like the VCR, have
outpaced their ancestors' limitations, gradually

The epk journey's hero - in formation.

extending human faculties across space and time.

Yet what first promises to be the digital Origin
of Species turns out to be a sequel to The Odyssey:
media's progress is presented as an epic journey
toward freedom, unseating censors along the way.

Ironically, The Soft Edge largely ignores the
mischievous observation by its mentor, Marshall
McLuhatr, that the medium is the mass age. Lev¬
inson's archetypar'open"Web is a pull-centric,
public-minded Internet. The online world, mean¬
while, has morphed from global village into a city
of nets fueled by competition and consolidation.

Of course, paradigm shifts have unleashed cre¬
ative turbulence since at least the time of Noah.
And The Soft Edge's bit-driven cosmology has a
deus ex machina that saves it from the informa¬
tion deluge - an arc of accelerating growth
steered by an invisible hand, - Wiliiam 0. Goggins

The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the information
Revolution, by Paul Levinson: US$25. Routledge: +T (212) 216
7800.

WIRED MARCH 1998

□ 3m

offers all the creature comforts of your finer sport-utilities, like soft
leather seating, wood grain patterned trim and alloy wheels. It also offers
something these competitors don’t: the added luxury of two sunroofs. To
tcstndrive this outstanding All-Wheel Drive vehicle, stop by your nearest
Subaru dealer, tall I-80Q-WANT-AWD or visit our website at www.subaru.com

SUBARU©

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By Jesse Freund

A

Aim

i4i

Mutant Falre

From the French company Ubf
Soft comes a charming little
game called TonkTm tie. Help
the kooky purple monster
Ed retrieve a can of mutation-
inducing agents that has acci¬
dentally fallen into the grasp
of the evil Grogh the Hellish,
Enhanced by the Pentium II
processor, this is one of the
first DVD-ROW games on the
market, in all, the new title
features both a clever story line
and richly textured graphics*

Release: Apr iUJbi Soft Enter
tainment+1 £415) 547 4000.

Return of
the Dragon

Blackstone Group senior
adviser Daniel Bursters latest
book about an Asian economy,
Big Dragon , focuses on the
threat challenge, and oppor¬
tunity posed by China. Among
other controversial predictions,
the author believes thatln
the 2030s, China will emerge
as the biggest single national
economy in the world/

Release: March. Simon &
Schuster: +1 £212) 698 7277.

Double Barrel

The promise of Widespread ISDN is finally here
- although it arrives in the guise of plain old
telephone service. Diamond Multimedia Sys¬
tems" new Shotgun software ties together the
datastreams of two analog phone lines, so these
bonded 56K modems are free to realize down¬
load speeds similar to ISDN's 115 Kbps*

A bonded 56K modem won't come cheap:
Diamond Multimedia's offering, the SupraSonk
II, which is actually a single board holding two
modems, costs around US$200, and ISPs will
certainly charge for the second phone connec¬
tion. But the cost-benefit ratio of a bonded
modem does compare favorably with ISDN*

Plus, Shotgun allows you to release the second
phone line, so you can choose to receive calls
while the data connection is live*

The bigger question: When will the 56K stan¬
dards schism be resolved? Diamond Multimedia
supports Rockwell's K56 flex technology, and
3Com is developing a similar product for U*S.
Robotics's x2 format. Both sides have vowed to
reconcile their differences this year, but it'll be
difficult to convince consumers to plunk down
big dollars while the smoke is still clearing* Then
again, if the closest alternative is ISDN, people
frustrated with spotty service will likely line up
to get aboard the bonded-modem bandwagon*

Release: March. Diamond Multimedia Systems :+1 (408)
325 7000.

Very Dumb Terminal

What do you get when you combine Windows
NT, Windows CE, and a LAN? Aside from a whole
lotta Microsoft, Network Computing Devices
thinks that its latest product, a thin-client code-
named Thumper, answers that question with
a cheap and simple way for businesses to give
many workers access to Windows applications
and company wide resources.

Thumper falls under the thin-client umbrella
because it reigns in local computing power - the
device offers a modicum of processing power, no
local storage, and the simple Windows CE operat¬
ing system - but the product ties into Microsoft's
new Hydra networking software, which allows
people to tap applications and computational

brawn residing on shared Windows NT 4*0 ser¬
vers. While some pundits have questioned Bill
Gates's commitment to network computing,
Hydra signals an impressive initiative - in part
because it gives an entire intranet a Microsoft-
controlled interface.

For its part, NCD is quick to emphasize the
advantages of a Thumper-NT, client-server archi¬
tecture: the hardware is inexpensive, people have
a familiarity with Windows, and it's easy to man¬
age applications in a centralized environment.
From a business perspective, the product's main
advantage over the big-iron mainframe terminals
of yesteryear is a decidedly cheaper, somewhat
prettier, and entirely Microsoft display for, well,
the network itself.

Release: Before summer. NCD: + 1 (415) 694 0650.

Schizo ISDN

For alt of you with ISDN con¬
nections, Ericssons new Home
Internet Solution employs a
watered-down DSL technol¬
ogy to transmit voice and
data over the same line at the
same time. When the phone
rings, this mode ml Eke termi¬
nal reduces your networking
speed to 70 Kbps - down
from ISDN's usual 115 Kbps
- and lets you yap away to
your hearts content.

Release: March. Ericsson:

■H (972) 583 8383.

Monumental

Misadventure

The new game Douglas Adams
Starship Titanic, conceived by
the author of The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy , tells the
story of an in ter stellar liner
that abruptly crashes into your
living room. Board the wreck¬
age and talk to the trauma¬
tized robots and a crazed
parrot (voice talent provided
by Monty Python's Terry Jones)
to determine what caused the
fatal accident,

Release: March. Simon &
Schuster Interactive: +1 £212)
698 7000.

WIRED MARCH 1998

D30

Because a single SparQ™
cartridge gives you

same room as

THE REVOLUTION

If you’ re considering buying a Zip™ drive
stop and consider buying the new one gig
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And 5porOm is now ovoiiobio ot:

CompUSA. Computer City. Best Buy. Micro Center, J&R Computer World , Fry's.
Datavision, Bek-Tek, RCS Computer Experience. Eggheod, Creative Computer,
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*St99 gets you a gig and the SparQ drive. Additional gigs are $33 each when yau buy a three pack.

Other wise they're only $39 each. Comparison is based upon a 10-pack of Zip'™ disks al $99 SRP. © 1997
SyQuest Technology,, fnc. Syquest is □ registered trademark. The SyQuest logo and SparQ™ are
trademarks oF SyQuest Technology, Inc Zip™ is o trademark of Iomega Corporation.

All other names ore trademarks of their respective companies.

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Wired’s HotBot.

The ultimate search machine

Signal to Noise

he end of the decade
I is nearly upon us. What
better time to evaluate '90s
technoculture? Evidently, the
moment is also ripe for taking
the piss out of those who nur¬
tured the way new Zeitgeist.
Author Carla Sinclair is no
stranger to the scene; her
latest book, Signal to Noise,
caricatures the San Francisco
slackers and scenesters, zea¬
lots and zi n esters who smoked
DMT with Monde 2000 freaks
and climbed the Wired ladder
Though the tybetcultural
parody will most amuse those
who've experienced it first¬
hand, the un wired masses can

Tales of the city,

still enjoy this fast-paced read.
Sinclair pairs Jim Knight a
stressed -out editor, with
twentysomething M Astura.
The two meet while searching
for Darren Cooper among
drug -using subcultures.

If you're looking for the
next Ulysses, better go else-
wher e. Signal to Noise trades
in the immediacy of online
prose. But along with its sillier
trappings, Sinclair's novel
offers a distinctive perspective
on the foibles of the wired life
- Many Lee Brown

Signal to Noise , by Carla
Sinclair: US$22.50. Harper-
San Francisco: on the Web at
www.harpercoIlm.comA

README

ON THE BOOKSHELVES OF THE DIGERATI

IDIT HAREL

founder and CEO of MoMo-
Media (www.mamamedia
.com/), and one of the first
graduates of the MIT Medio
iabf where she studied
technology and learning.
Joystick Nation: How
Videogames Ate Our
Quarters, Won Our Hearts,
and Rewired Our Minds ,
by J.C. Hen/ Hera offers a
good overview of the history
of videogames and of the
generation that grew up
playing them. Videogames
are wonderful spaces where
children learn on their own,
driven by their own curios¬
ity. At MaMaMedia we want
to create an educational
environment that is more
like a videogame than a
school worksheet."

Picasso and Braque:
Pioneering Cubism, by
William Rubin. 'This is my
secret:! love coffee-table
books. Most are not intellec¬
tually satisfying, but Picasso
and Braque , published by
the Museum of Modem Art
in New York, is fascinating.
Over a period of years, the
two artists worked together,
and you can see how they
would take a common
theme and then move in
different creative directions.
Together they launched a
movements style, a com¬
munity. Yet each needed his
own canvas. When you think
about the computer as a
canvas, you realize that five
children cannot share a
single computer, as many
educators suggest. Each
child has a different creative
style/

ALIZA SHERMAN

president of the media com¬
pany Cybergrrl and author of
Cybergrrl: A Woman's Guide
to the World Wide Web.

The Angel of Darkness,
by Caleb Carr "This sequel
to The Alienist is set in New
York City in the 1800s, In
every era, people say how
terrible things a re. Reading
history, I find the same prob¬
lems have always existed.

The Angel of Darkness is a
murder mystery about a
serial killer and a motley
crew of detectives. The
victims are children, and the
suspected killer is a woman.
The story delves into the role
of women, the role of the
mother. And the themes that
emerge a re the same ones
we hear today in reaction to

Susan Smith and other crim¬
inal women. Society is still
unabie to believe in female
serial killers. It goes against
our notion of femininity."
Release 2.0: A Design for
Living in the Digital Age,
by Esther Dyson ."This book
discusses how we as a soci¬
ety should integrate tech¬
nology into our lives. I had
thought of Dyson as a policy
advocate and was expecting
a dry dissertation on XYZ. But
the style was conversational
and filled with personality. In
the chapters on community,

1 found a warmth that I
wasn't expecting. For me, the
book said that everything I ve
been doing with Webgrrls is
viable, that community is just
as important as individual
privacy, that community is
the cornerstone - it's the
heart of the matter/

ELLEN ULLMAN

a software engineer and con¬
sultant, and author of Close
to the Machine: Tech noph ilia
and Its Discontents.

Fermat 's Last Theorem:
Unlocking the Secret of
an Ancient Mathematical
Problem, by Amir Aczel
"This little paperback
describes the history of
solving Fermat's Last Theo¬
rem. J'm reading it for a
sense of how you tel] a
highly technical story in a
way that an educated reader
could understand. It follows
the unraveling of a mathe¬
matical puzzle, a mystery
solved over centuries by
hundreds of scholars. People
think of programming as a
solitary endeavor, but, like
mathematics, it's really a

collaboration of thinkers
over years."

The Reader: A Novel, by
Bernhard Schlink. "This is
a gem of a novel. The writing
is exquisite, the descriptions
of human interaction are so
vivid and so particular that
they resonate, In the first
part of the novel, the narra¬
tor, ill with tuberculosis, has
an affair with an older
woman. We see her through
his eyes, again with very
particular details. Then he
runs Into her years later.

The story turns on who she
has become, on her role in
German history. He's horrified
by the past relationship, yet
still finds himself attracted
to her. The leap from exquis¬
ite personal story to the
sweeping historical novel is
so smooth. Its a wonderful
book."

*

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Q30

Backyard Baseball

o many sports programs

’ are so serious. Real players,
real stats, real rules.! get
review copies of these things
all the time, and I foist them
off on local obsessive sports
nerds. But lam not giving
away my CD-ROM of Backyard
Baseball.

In Backyard Baseball ,you
coach a team of dopey-
loo king kids. When you pick
teams, definitely don't miss
Pablo Sanchez, He doesn't
speak English, but he's the
best player in the league. I
usually put him in left field.
Pete Wheeler isn't too bright
[Tm gonna hit a touchdown;'

A team of misfits.

he says as he steps up to the
plate), but he sure can hit.Kie-
sha Phillips is a must - count
on her to hit it out of the park.
If you pick Sidney Webber, pick
her twin sister, Ashley, too -
they play better together.

Backyard Baseball is for kids
5 to 10, but most players on
my real-life team (21 and up)
love it. Sports nerds may pre¬
fer more realistic ball games,
but the rest of us may find
ourselves addicted to leading
little bands of junior misfits to
victory. -Amy Bmckman

Backyard Baseball: US$29.95.
Hu mongo us Entertainment:
+1 (425) 485 9258,

WIRED MARCH 199

Notes from Underground

ed up with mass media that’s hopelessly out of sync with your

worldview? Think you can do better? Do-it-yourself publishing
beckons, but where do you start? A guide of some permanence - say,
a book - is called for. Yet thanks in part to the Internet, information
changes so rapidly that much of it may be out of date by the time you
see it in print.

Wired contributing writer Gareth Branwyn set himself a fearsome
task when he sat down to write Jamming the Media% his “citizen’s
guide to reclaiming the tools of communication ” Branwyn gamely
resolved to compile - in print, mind you - nothing less than a per¬
manent, accurate, and reliable resource for all producers of alterna¬
tive media (zines, cable-access TV, pirate radio, music, films, video).
You find yourself wanting terribly for him to succeed and - given the
constraints - so he does.

With Jamming, Branwyn does an admirable job of marshalling the
rag-tag resources of the far-flung DIY community into something
resembling coherence, and a spot-check finds his sources impressively
up to date. And he promises that any revisions will be posted on the
Web, Yet reading the book, you’re left with one of the worst symptoms

DIY publishing made accessible.

of information anxiety: is the data in front of you still current, or
should you check it against what’s online? The printed word never
seemed so fragile.

Branwyn can he naggingly gung-ho when he pays court to his
cronies at bOING bOING and his neighbors, who crop up with alarm¬
ing regularity. However, his lists of alternative efforts do manage to
prove there's no accounting for taste. Given the vagaries of DIY pub¬
lishing, the question is not whether it’s too transgressive or subversive
or whatever, but whether it’s any good - and Branwyn, to his credit,
frequently finds fault. He apologizes for the quality of cable-access
TV, buries disc-based multimedia (perhaps prematurely), and says
that far too much of pirate radio is “basically devoid of content ” On
the topic du jour, Branwyn writes matter- of-factly - “We’re losing
what’s really special about the Internet: people communicating with
each other.” A blurb on Jamming's jacket declares, “There’s never
been a better time to have something to say” The question is, do you
have something worth saying? - Ken Coupland

Jamming the Media: A Citizens Guide - Reclaiming the Tools of Communication, by Gareth Bran¬
wyn. US$18.95. Chronicle Books: +1 (415) 537 3730. on the Web at wwwchronbooks.com/.

Contributors

Tiffany Lee Brown (magdalen@magdalen.com) writes
for a veritable smorgasbord of digital and pop culture
magazines from her world headquarters in Portia ndr
Oregon. She is the editor of Sigum (www.slm-net.com
/ signum.htm } and assistant editor of the Fringe Ware
Review (wwwJringeware.com/).

Amy B ruck man (bruck@cc.gatech.edu) is an assistant
professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia
Institute of Technology where she does research on
educational software and virtual communities.

Ian Christe composes music for modern dance as
himself, digital death metal as Dark Ncerd, and Donkey
KongAn spired drum and bass as DJ Bazillion.

Ken Co upland (kcouptand@aol.comJ a contributing
editor at Graphis magazine, writes about art, architecture,
photography and interior and graphic design, with a
focus on the digital revolution.

Simson Garfmkel ( simsong@mit.edu ) is HotWired's
technology columnist.

Phil Hall ts an okapi at the Bronx Zoo,

Glen Helfaud writes about art, culture, and technology
for various publications, including NewMedia, The Advo¬
cate t LA Weekly Ahe Son Francisco Examiner, and Some
Weird Sin,

Chris Hudak is a technology

columnist, game critic, and judge of the Robot Wars in
San Francisco. He has seen The Color of Money 14 times.

Reena Jana contributes to The New York Times Magazine t
Flash Art, and Asian Art News. She needs constant visual
stimulation.

Jeffrey Mann (mannj@ibm.net) lives in Amsterdam and
Saint-Agnan-en-Yercors, France, He follows electronic
commerce for the Meta Group,

Peter G. Neumann moderates the Risks Forum news-
group (comp-risks) and is the author of Computer-Related
Risks.

Jay Ogilvy is a cofounder and vice president of Global
Business Network. Prior to that he spent seven years at
SRI, and before that 12 years teaching philosophy mostly
at Yale,

Paul Semel (beerhound@aol.com) Is the music and tech¬
nology editor of Bikini and writes about music, books, and
games for such magazines as Ray GunrAif$tari and Mixmag.

Michael Stutz (stutz@dsl.org) is a writer. The text of his
first novel, Sunciipse, has been released as freeware,

Jacob Ward is managing editor of Axcess magazine and
lives in San Francisco.

Norman Weinstein (nweinste@micfon.net} is a poet and
critic who writes about the arts and technology for The
Christian Science Monitor , MIT's Technology Review , and
The Boston Phoenix.

□ 30

spiraling

Wandering

YOU OPEN YOUR EYES

TO UNDERSTAND

i^r<£AMlQK£k

ijSiifcwofkB Corporation ’BafeaSuti G4m&5 Vonhjie No i Ol 997 Arrwri ,in
Iftf tftci^lfcirk of AmofScTtn Saltworks Ck>rporgttofi. Sanitarium is developed by
n 33 k a regi&fer&d ftadem&rk of Microsoft Corporation The ratings icon is a
>zm Association. AIJ rights rosen/ed.

ANl ARIUM

Great stuff - tested and approved in our top-secret labs.

By Chris ftubin

First Gass:

RS 8

Using 900-MHz technology it first per¬
fected in wireless mikes, Sennheiser has
created a highly sensitive instrument
with noise-reduction compression, allow¬
ing near full-frequency delivery up to
250 feet away. Combine that with great¬
sounding phones and a comfortable fit,
and you've got the best on the market.

RS 8: US$369.95. Sennheiser Electronic Corp:
+1 (860) 434 9190.

Business Gass:

MDR-RF940RK

With its battery- or AC-powered transmit¬
ter, this versatile 900-MHz set from Sony
will work outdoors and in the home. The
headphones self-adjust for a solid fit and
automatically turn themselves on when
you slip them over your head. They'll do
practically everything but choose the
music for you.

MDR-RF94GRK: US$1 49.99. Sony: + 1 (941 )
768 7669, on the Web at www.sony.com/.

(-

Coach:

W2005X Wireless Stereo
Headphone System
Recoton's 900’MHz setup comes with its
own walk man^ style headphones, but the
unit also allows you to convert any pair
from corded to cordless. Just plug in your
favorite ear goggles, dip the battery pack
onto your clothes, and you're no longer
tethered to the home stereo.

W200SX Wireless Stereo Headphone System:

US$1 29.99. Recoton: +1 (407) 333 8900.

L J

Tequila

First Class:

Paradiso Anejo
This blend of five-year-old tequilas was
assembled with the help of cognac maker
Alain Royer, who imported French oak
barrels for added smoothness. With a
complex bouquet and long finish, Par¬
adiso narrowly beats out Herradura's
US$275-a-bottle Selection Suprema,

Paradiso Ahejo: US$95, ElTesoro de Don
Felipe, imported by Robert Denton & Co:

+1 [248) 299 0600.

Business Gass:

Herradura Silver
Herradura is the Sara Lee of the tequila
business - nobody doesn't like 'em. The
distillery makes only estate- bottled, 100
percent agave tequilas, and its silver cat¬
egory (aged for just 40 days] delivers the
pure flavor of the spiny agave plant, not
of additives.

Herradura Silver: US$23. Tequila Herradura,
imported by Sazerac:+1 (504) 83 1 9450, on
the Web at www.50zerac.com/sazerac.hrm.

reposado tequila doesn't have a lot of
wood flavor, but it does have plenty of
dean, crisp fruit. Impressively Inexpen¬
sive, this Is the Number One-selling pre¬
mium bottle in Mexico, where distillers
know their cactus juice.

Sauza Hornitos: US$1 8. Tequila Sauza,
imported by Domecq: +1 (203) 637 6500,
on the Web at www harshxorrtA

L

Laptop Bags

First Class:

Safecase Deluxe
Computer Briefpack
You can spend dose to a grand on a com¬
puter bag from Gueti or Bally, but nothing
will protect your laptop as well - or as
stylishly - as Tumi's soft leather backpack
with its shock-absorbing sling. Best of all.
It doesn't look like a laptop bag, so it's less
likely to be stolen.

Safecase Deluxe Computer Briefpack: US$495.
Tumi:-H (732) 271 9500,

H

Business Gass:

Dragnet

Hipsters who wouldn't be caught dead
with a traditional black-leather briefcase
will relish this expandable messenger
bag. Made from recycled European truck
tires, all Freitag shoulder bags are color¬
ful, unique works of art in vinyl. There's
no cushioning, but they'll hold a laptop
plus a sandwich or a towel for the beach.

Dragnet: US$198. Freitag: +1 (415)252 1460,
on the Web at wwwJreitagxh/.

j* . . 1

Coach:

LapPak

If the LapPak is good enough for Steve
Jobs, shouldn't it be good enough for you?
Ergonomic and unquestionably cool, this
padded backpack not only has great looks,
but comes with a built-in wrist rest so you
can pop open the flap and start working
right out of the bag,

LapPak: US$98, Respect: + 1 (41 5) 51 2 8995,
on the Web at wwwrespecfus.com/.

L J

WIRED MARCH 1998

D3Q

BAG: WENDJ NORDECK

ADOBE’ ILLUSTRATOR: 7.0 for WINDOWS

YOU HAVE IDEAS THAT STAND OUT.

NO JOB IS TOO BIG OR TOO SMALL,
From the simplest graphics to the most
complex artwork, new Adobe Illustrator 7,0
for Windows handles just about all your
illustration jobs.

PRECISE CONTROL OF ARTWORK
AND TYPE, Create, transform and align
elements just the way you want.
Adjustable “snap-to" guides and grids
make layout design easier. You tan even
wrap text around any shape or run type
along any line.

WORKS SEAMLESSLY WITH
ADOBE PHOTOSHOP*and Adobe
PageMaker* like no other illustration software.
You leam and work faster, with the same user
interface, including shortcuts and menus. Even
drag and drop among all three programs.

Th* Induitry-fUndinf ilkiilnEln snftiari

Adobe Illustrator 7.0

WINDOWS AND MACINTOSH* —
SAME GREAT FEATURES. It's never been
easier to share files across platforms with
colleagues, clients and service bureaus.

UNMATCHED COMPATIBILITY.
Input from anywhere, output for everywhere.
Support for more than 20 image, graphics
and text formats, including TIFF, WMF,
CDR, PhotoCD™ GIF89a and MS-Word—
plus Adobe PostScript® printing, too.

NOW YOU CAN GET THE
SOFTWARE TO PROVE IT.

From its intuitive interface to its powerful graphic capability, Adobe Illustrator 7.0 works the way you do. It gives you
simple, yet powerful filters and effects to put a fresh look on all your graphics — just click and create. Grab input from file formats
you're familiar with. TIFF, CDR, PhotoCD, GIF89a, Microsoft Word, over 15 formats in all. With support for Postscript®, and
both RGB and CMYK color, your ideas can see the light of day, just as you intended, virtually anywhere: print, digital or Web. In the
name of simplicity, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and PageMaker use the same intuitive graphic interface. So when you've
mastered Illustrator, basically you've mastered them all. Drag. Drop. Stand out. Because blending in isn't an option.

Call 1-800-649-3875 ext. 41900 or visit www.adobe.com/prodindex/illustrator.

M

Adobe

filVSS Adobe Systems Incorporated, All rights reserved. Adobe, the Adobe logo, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop. PageMaker, and PostScript are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft
Cor pm nation . Inc. Macintosh is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc, registered in the US and other countries. PhotoCD ri a i rademark of Eastman Kodak. All ot her trademarks art the property of their respective ownens.

Deductibw unkets

Meetings of the minds. By Bob Parks

April 27-29
Internet & Electronic
Commerce
New York

Most analysts stop at pre¬
dicting that Net commerce
will reach US$6 to $8 billion
by century's turn, but the
GartnerGroup is actually
helping us get there. Speak¬
ers at this Gartner- sponsored
strategy session - among
them Jim McCann of 1 -800-
Flowers, Michael Dell of Dell
Computer, and Halsey Minor
of CNET - promise to get
down to brass tacks, with
real -life examples of online
commerce. Case studies
focus on nine industries,
from retail to insurance to
entertainment

Tete a T£te Potential
Geek Factor
Idea Takeaway
Star Power

Registrar on: US $1,3 95,
Contact: +1 (203) 256 4700, on
the Web at www.iec-eitpo.com/.

★ it
it
it it
it it it

The Current Roundup

{see Wired 6.02)

March 14-17SXSW
Interactive '98; Austin, Texas.

March 22-25 PC Forum,
Tucson, Arizona.

March 25-27 Ethicomp98:
Rotterdam, the Netherlands,

March 25-27 Marketing
on the Internet: The 1 998
Conference; Phoenix

March 29-April 2 Infocom J98:
San Francisco.

April 27-May 2
Tucson III
Tucson, Arizona

Also known under the title
Toward a Science of Con¬
sciousness, Tucson 111 brings
together hundreds of top
thinkers from fields includ¬
ing philosophy, computer
science, and neuroscience to
discuss such questions as, "Is
it possible to build conscious¬
ness into a machine?" and
"Would a conscious machine
exist as a souped-up PC, or
as some new kind of quan¬
tum computer?" For the
safety of all brains involved,
this event happens only
every two years. Says ring¬
leader Stuart Hameroff, a
professor of anesthesiology
and psychology at the Uni¬
versity of Arizona /'There are
more focused conferences,
but nobody's been able to
pull off a giant circus tent
like this."

Tete a Tete Potential
Geek Factor
Idea Takeaway
Star Power

Registration: US$325, Contact:
+1 (520)621 7724, fax +1 (520)
621 3269, on the Web at www
consciousnessarUona. edit/

May 4-8
CGDC '98

Long Beach, California

"There's an exposition floor and sessions,
but I go just to find out what everyone's
up to," says one game designer about the
annual Computer Game Developers' Con¬
ference, the biggest of its kind. The show's
session descriptions can be confusing, our
industry insider notes, and its tutorials
sometimes result in no more than a few
software tweaks, but who cares? The real
action is in the bars and hotels of sunny
Long Beach, where thousands of show
attendees engage in multiplayer facetime.
Hot-tub topics this year should include the
new mass-marketed 3-D acceleration cards
and the Public PC/Open Arcade initiatives,
bids to make the development platform
for arcade games the same as for the PC.
Enjoy fraternizing, but don't miss the key¬
note presentations from Ultima creator
Richard Garritt and Civilization builder
Sid Meier Between them, these two have
reinvented gaming a few times, so they
can certainly help you imagine your next
blockbuster title.

Tete a Tete Potential

★ ★★

Geek Factor

★ ★★

Idea Takeaway

jL.

Star Power

★ ★★

Registration: US$795 through March 27, $1,095 after.
Contact: +1 (41 5) 905 2388, email cgdc@mfi.com. on
the Web at wwwxgdc.com/

May 410

Africa Telecom 98
Midrand, South Africa

Because 33 of the world's
48 least-developed countries
are in Africa, any new tech¬
nology that's introduced
there is bound to be state of
the art In other words, the
continent Is a prime candi¬
date for telecom Investment
and high tech leapfrogging.
(Why build circuits when
you can send packets?) The
International Telecommuni¬
cation Union has organized
this meeting of ambassa¬
dors, delegates, investors,
and techies to discuss the
new digital and wireless
prospects under the theme
"African Renaissance: Spec¬
trum of Opportunity Nel¬
son Mandela himself invited
the event to South Africa.

Tete a Tete Potential
Geek Factor
Idea Takeaway
Star Power

Registration: CHF2000
(approximately US$1 ,400).
Contact: +41 (22) 730 6161,
fax +41 [22) 730 6444, email
africa-lelecom u.mt, on the
Web at www.itu.mt/tefecom/

May 10 12
ACM Policy ’98
Washington, DC
Call it CDA preventions
this new annual conference,
eminent geeks bring policy¬
makers up to speed on tech¬
nology issues. EFF board
member Dave Farber leads
a panel on universal Net
access, and UC Berkeley
professor and Mac Arthur
Fellow Pamela Sam nelson
runs a program on intellec¬
tual property. Other topics
include Net commerce and
online learning. Because this
gathering also functions as
the annual meeting for the
sponsoring Association for
Computing Machinery, many
of the organization's tech¬
nologists will be in town to
learn how to inform public
policy firsthand Says Farber
of his panel, "This one ain't
gonna be quiet - people
don't rally against universal
access, but they do ask how
the devil you fund it."

Tete a Tete Potential

kk

Geek Factor

it

Idea Takeaway

kkk

Star Power

kirk

Registration: US$300 through
April 1, $350 after. Contact:
on the Web at www.acm.org
/usacm/even ts/poficy98/.

WIRED MARCH 1998

□ 40

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Ecological Design

Creative integration of envi¬
ronment and technology.
While its original intent as
a sustainable "green" design
philosophy was to move
away from the metaphor of
the machine, the term is now
being used to describe the
incorporation of machines
into our daily lives. Silicon
Graphics chief scientist Bill
Buxton, for instance, applies
it to ubiquitous computing.

"In this case, ecological
design is the design of tech¬
nology that takes into account
both social and physical con¬
text of where and how it will

Generative Art

Process by which a computer creates unique works from fixed para¬
meters defined by the artist. The result can range from an engaging
screensaver to a jazz solo to a lush virtual world.

The term generative art is most likely derived from "generative gram¬
mar/ a linguistic theory Noam Chomsky first proposed in his book
Syntactic Structures (1965) to refer to deep-seated rules that describe
any language. Steven Holtzman, author of Digital Mosaics (1997), traces
the art form to the dawn of the information age in the 1960s, when
musicians like Gottfried Michael Koenig and Iannis Xenakis pioneered
computer composition* De facto generative art spokesperson Brian Eno
didn't get turned on to the process until many years later*

"Generative music enjoys some of the benefits of both its ancestors
[live music and recorded musk)," Eno wrote in A Year with Swollen
Appendices (1996)/Like live music it is always different* Like recorded
music it is free of time-and-place limitations - you can hear it when and
where you want*! really think it is possible that our grandchildren will
look at us in wonder and say:'you mean you used to listen to exactly the

same thing over and over again ?J"

The visual application of generative
art is newer, however. In the mid-1970s
British abstract painter Harold Cohen
plugged in his palette and designed
AARON, a computer artist that pro¬
duces original work* Since then, gen¬
erative techniques have been used to
grow artificial life based on genetic
algorithms and massively complex vir¬
tual worlds that take infinitely longer
than seven days to create by hand. But
whatever the output, there is always
a human behind the high tech curtain.

"The computer is actually generat¬
ing the art in partnership with the
artist/programmer, who defines the
fields of possibilities/ says Hoitzman,
who has been experimenting with
generative music for more than 20
years/People live with this romantic notion that an artist gets struck
with a thunderbolt of inspiration and runs to the piano or canvas and
expresses an idea. The reality is that art has a format underpinning, and
computers are a perfect tool because they're perfect for manipulating
formal structure/

be used," explains Buxton,
who also cites the influence
of ecological psychology, the
study of how humans inter¬
act with their environment.
"The technology is invisible
and the service is delivered
in the right form at the right
time for the right person/
Picture a public toilet with
hands-free flushing so you
don't have to touch anything*
Or a car phone that automat¬
ically turns down the stereo
when there's an incoming call.
Perhaps this subdiscipline
should be rebranded rech-
ological design. ■ ^

Meta

Modifier describing the presenta¬
tion of representation* From the
Greek, meaning "among/ "after/
or "beyond," as in Metaphysics,
the title of the text that followed
Aristotle's Physics.

In its strictest sense, the prefix
serves as a context provider -
tacked onto a field of study, meta
designates a new discipline that
critiques the original one* "State¬
ments made in a 'meta' study are
statements obouf a science or other
subject area, rather than statements
within the area," explains innova¬
tive educator Herbert Kohl in From
Archetype to Zeitgeist (1992)* Meta¬
language, for example, is a language
used to describe another language.

A fitting meta metaphor might
be nesting dolls, surrounding and
embedding information with even
more information. The truth, after
ail, is more likely to be in there than
out there. Any student of the Bard
can tell you that the key to grokking
the drama of Shakespeare's Hamlet
lies in the play-within-a-play* Like¬
wise, Mystery Science Theater 3000
relies on the self-conscious giggles
that overtake us while we watch the
show's hosts deconstructing the
movie on their screen. Thus meta at
least adds "novelty" if nothing exact¬
ly new. Of course, the term applies
to participants, not just observers:
note San Francisco's drag-queen
Faux Beauty Pageant, where women
dress as men dressed as women.

Ultimately, meta's meaning
turns on the efficiency of inserting
"brackets." Like folders within fold¬
ers on your computer desktop,
going meta insulates your brain
from the full scope of the subject,
placing it at the safe intellectual
distance required for rational orga¬
nization. b m k

WIRED MARCH 1998

□ 40

THE ST RE ET.COM IS JAMES CRAMER, DAVE KANSAS AND A TON OF OTHER
STREETWISE FINANCIAL NEWS JUNKIES WHO INFORM, PROVOKE AND AGITATE,

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She knew she’d have to explain it,

probably even apologize For it, sooner or later, but
Dr. Amanda Koteas didn't think she’d be doing it now.
Nevertheless, after weeks of rumors and stolen memos
and lab reports turning up in the tabloid press and on
TV, Koteas, head of the University of Pennsylvania's
Department of Molecular and Cellular Engineering and
the school's institute for 1 Inman Gene Therapy, decided
to tell the full story. At a hastily pul led -together press
conference last Friday, she announced to the world
that not only is human cloning possible, but that she
and her team had already done it - two years earlier,
using an updated version of the techniques scientists
at the Kostin Institute used to create the sheep Dolly,
the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, in 1997,

The result of Koteas and company's bold experiment
was a healthy 8-pound girl named Katy, born in secret
to Virginia and Christopher Hytner at the institute on
December 5, 1999.

Why did Koteas wait so long to go public with the
story? During our interview7, it is clear that she remains
moved by the child's birth, but ambivalent about dis¬
cussing the cloning. “This was a medical procedure
with a name and a child’s face” she says. “We wrere

Rickard Kadrey, the author of several novels, writes
about technology and culture from San Francisco.

hoping to keep the circumstances of Katy’s birth out
of ihe pub lie eye for a few more years at least. She's
a normal kid and deserves a normal childhood”

It's unlikely anything about Katy Hytner's life is
going to be normal for years to come. Not only has
the press descended oil Pacifica, a coastal community
20 minutes south of San Francisco, but so have reli¬
gious groups, film and book agents, and conspiracy
buffs. While Pacifica is used to tourists, the current
mix of curiosity-seekers is not sitting well with local
residents. Says Thomas Winkler, owner of the Good
Morning America coffee shop, “ft's like Lhere was an
explosion at the idiot factory and all the debris landed
here” Punching receipts into his cash register, Winkler
reflects for a moment before adding, “They should all
jusl leave that little girl alone”

The Hytners are not the only ones overwhelmed by
the publicity surrounding this story Koteas and her
team are still trying to absorb die enormity of public
reaction. “It’s much more surreal than we ever imag¬
ined;' she says. “Frightening, too ”

Koteas and her colleagues have reason to be fright¬
ened. Several members of the cloning team have
received death threats, while others, such as Adam
Walken, whose studies into the genetics of aging
encouraged the team that human cloning wras pos¬
sible, have been inundated with offers for movies

WIRED MARCH 1990

040

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“If we win the Nobel Prize, I wonder

and talk show appearances. Tn the corridors of the
University of Pennsylvania, the words “Nobel Prize*
and -‘jail time” are men Lion ed with equal frequency.
School president James Gsterberg has issued a terse
press statement: “The university in no way condones
the secret and unauthorized experiments conducted
by doctors Amanda Koteas, Adam Walken, Eric Morten-
sen, Moriah Stoltz, and Albert Gomez. A full internal
investigation is under way to determine whether any
lawrs have been violated.”

“We did the work using university facilities, so yes,
technically, university funds were used for the work
admits Koteas. “And some of those funds were tied
to government grants The use of such funding, she
acknowledges, defied the moratorium on human-
cloning research encouraged by then -President Clin¬
ton in 1097. At her home in suburban Philadelphia,
Koteas looks out the window. “We weren't conducting
research for the sake of research. We were applying
established scientific knowledge to a specific problem,
i stand by that” She laughs anxiously. “If we win the
Nobel Prize, I wonder if they'll let me keep mine in
my cell?”

All this wTeek, while the members of the Pennsyl¬
vania cloning team pondered their collective futures,
Katy Hytner, an outwardly ordinary 2-year-old who
had only last week been playing with Legos and
Sesame Street dolls at the Oceanview Children’s Cen¬
ter in Pacifica, was not yet awrare of the controversy
surrounding her birth.

Her “conception” began more than

two years ago in the Prenatal Diagnosis Unit at the
Institute for Human Gene Therapy The university’s
cutting-edge combination of advanced computer
analysis, genetic screening, and gene therapy had
caused a stir in 1998, both as a scientific break¬
through and as a controversial moneymaking enter¬
prise for the university (see “Buying the Future:
Perfect Kids for Cold Cash ” Wired page 450).

Combining proprietary chemical and genetic tests
for diseases and congenital abnormalities, all collated
by the new “expert system” software developed at
Carnegie Mellon University, the institute had devel¬
oped a system that, according to its own publicity
materials, “virtually guarantees not only a successful

labor and delivery, but the healthy child every family
dreams about.”

Virginia and Christopher Hytner had talked about
having children for year's. “But we wanted to wait
until the time was right,” says Virginia, a part-time
real estate agent. Her husband, a design engineer at
Silicon Graphics in Mountain View, California, adds,
“With our careers on track and our lives stable, the
only things holding us back were health questions.”

The Hytners, like a lot of the boomer generation,
had waited until their late 30s to have children. While
both were outwardly healthy, Virginia Hytner had
some concerns about the healLh of any child she might
bear. “Even though I don’t have diabetes, my mother
and an aunt do,” she explains via phone. “I wanted to
know about the possibility of passing that to my child.

1 also know that there are other problems that a child
can have when coining from a diabetic background
Hearing of the University of Pennsylvania’s successful
screening program, the Hytners took their 1998 vaca¬
tion in Philadelphia.

While much of the couple’s concern centered on Vir¬
ginia’s genetic background, both prospective parents
went through the screening process at the Prenatal
Diagnosis Unit. This procedure is fairly simple for a
man; only blood tests and sperm samples are required.
Potential mothers, however, are injected with the hor¬
mone-based drug Metrodin to induce “superovulation.”
This bumper crop of eggs lets doctors collect samples
for screening. Metrodin and related pharmaceuticals
frequently bring on PMS-type cramps and other hor¬
mone-related discomforts.

Using the mother’s eggs and the father’s sperm, doc¬
tors fertilize several of the eggs in vitro. They then
allow' the fertilized eggs to grow until the eight-cell
stage. Once the eggs have reached tills phase, the doc¬
tors remove a cel 1 from the egg and examine it using
the university's proprietary tests, as well as a standard
genetic-screening procedure known as nested PCR, a
polymerase chain reaction that tags and amplifies DNA
sequences so that doctors - or, in this case, a computer
- can look for abnormalities.

For the Hytners, the tests indicated that the cell
was clear of disease and congenital defects, and the
couple chose to have the already- fertilized egg implanted
in Virginia’s uterus that day. Roteas, a native of San
Francisco, performed that implantation herself, after

WIRED MARCH 1998

if they’ll let me keep mine in my cell?”

meeting the Hytners during routine rounds at the Prenatal
Diagnosis Unit. After an overnight stay and an exam the
next morning, Virginia Hytner was released to rejoin her
husband and plan the arrival of their first child.

But something went wrong.

IPs not hard to believe the doctors and technicians
at the Prenatal Diagnosis Unit when they say they still
aren’t sure what happened* Modern jet aircraft, handled
by expert pilots and aided by the most advanced comput¬
ers, still crash* In most of those cases, human error is the
culprit- Was human error responsible for implanting a
defective embryo in Virginia Hytner? We will probably
never know. “There are nights I still lie awake wondering
what went wrong,” says Koteas. “Did a tech mislabel a
cel! culture? Or enter data into the new computer incor¬
rectly? Did someone read a chart wrong? Was there
something / did wrong?”

Virginia gave birth to a daughter on Januaiy 3, 1999.
The child, which had seemed sluggish in the womb, was
pronounced dead two weeks later of multiorgan failure.

The cause of death was a subtle one: neonatal lactic
acidosis, a problem brought about by a defect in the
mitochondria - microscopic organelles that control the
metabolism of individual cells - in her mother’s egg.

A woman can be unaffected by the defective mitochon¬
dria in her cells, only to have them wreak havoc in her
developing offspring.

The death of the Hytners’ daughter devastated the
couple. Even now, two years later and after the birth of
a healthy child, Virginia can’t completely describe how
she felt: “Numb. 1 felt dead. After all the assurances of
the doctors, I felt alone and betrayed . ” Koteas, who years
before had lost a child to a rare chromosomal disease,
trisomy 13, was also shattered by the baby’s death. “We
had done so well at the screening clinic, we started to
believe the university’s hype about us,” she says. “We
were perfect, and then we weren’t, and a child was dead.
It was awful.55

Enter Adam Walken, Koteas’s friend and colleague
at the Institute for Human Gene Therapy. Walken was
studying how cells change and break down as they age
and was interested in finding a way to arrest or reverse
this process. He had been studying in particular tiny
sections of chromosomes known as telomeres - chemi¬
cal buffers at each end of a chromosome that act like
the bumpers on a car. They protect the genes inside
from damage, but each time a cell divides, the telomere

buffer often decreases in length. Eventually, the telomeres
become so short that they can’t protect the chromosomes,
and the cell stops dividing and dies.

The question Walken - and other researchers - wanted
to answer was, If you could restore or stop the erosion
of a cell’s telomeres, could you stop or reverse the aging
process? One way to find out was through studying pri¬
mate cloning. Could the older, telomere-eroded ceils of
an adult primate be restored to their pristine condition in
an embryo during the cloning process? When the Oregon
Regional Primate Research Center in Beaverton cloned
a rhesus monkey, Walken received a National Science
Foundation grant to work and study there.

While the results of his studies on aging are still incon¬
clusive (researchers don’t yet understand all the proteins
that produce telomeres, nor the mechanisms that erode
the buffers), Walken did learn about the basic science of
primate cloning and was a member of the team that in
late 1998 first cloned a chimpanzee (an animal so similar
to humans that it shares 98 percent of its DNA with us)
using the technique employed by the Roslin Institute.
Walken has admitted that while he was working at the
primate center, he was convinced that human cloning
was possible but didn’t think he would ever really know
in his lifetime. “The climate was all wrong. Even to say
the words was a heresy,” he says. “When the Hytners’
daughter died, something clicked in my brain. It wasn’t
something planned, but the logic was inescapable ”

It was during a discussion over dinner that the subject
of human cloning became serious for Koteas and Walken.
Both had been experiencing crises of faith in their are
as of expertise and were questioning the possibilities of
technical fixes to problems such as aging and childbirth.
“1 told Amanda about depressions we experienced at the
primate center during some of the cloning trials, but said
that with concentrated effort, we were confident we had
worked out a straightforward and reliable process to pro¬
duce identical primates for study. She told me about her
despair over the Hytners. Then, all of a sudden, we just
sori of looked at each other.” Depending on your point of
view, either a conspiracy or a bold scientific experiment
was conceived thal night.

Despite the almost mystical power of the word cloning,
t lie process happens constantly in nature and has become
routine in labs around the world. Identical twins - nor¬
mal children born even7 day - are clones. Amoebae clone
themselves when they divide. For several years cancer

WIRED MARCH T 9 9 8

□ 40

and retrovirus researchers have been using groups of
cloned mice to test drug treatments. Plants clone them¬
selves when they send off shoots and buds. Many com¬
mon fruits and vegetables such as apples, bananas,
grapes, garlic, and potatoes have become grocery-store
staples because of plant breeding and cloning. Cloning
large animals in a lab, however - especially mammals
- is more complex.

When the Roslin Institute conceived the clone Dolly
in July 1996, seven months before Lhe sheep was pre¬
sented to the world, the big question researchers had to
answer was whether an adult cell that had become spe¬
cialized for one part of the body (in the case of Dolly’s
“mother” an udder cell) could be made to “forget” thaL
it was specialized and return to a nonspeeialized, embry¬
onic state. Dr. Ian Wilmut and his associates al Roslin
made a breakthrough using a process called demethy-
lation. Simply, they kept normal nutrients from the cell
and starved it in a salt solution until it became dor¬
mant and stopped dividing. This intervention allowed
the Roslin team to fuse the sleeping celts genetic mate¬
rial with another sheep egg from which the DNA had
already been removed - a process known as nuclear
transfer.

It took the Roslin Institute 277 tries

to bring a single pregnancy to term. Still, it worked.
After experimenting with rhesus monkeys for a year, the
Oregon Regional Primate Research Center could achieve
pregnancy every 50 attempts. When researchers there
developed the chemical procedures to demethylate chim¬
panzee cells, they hit every 20 tries.

Once scientists have cracked the method of returning
cells to their embryonic state, the rest of the cloning
procedure is a relatively simple, mechanical process.
After the DNA is inserted into an egg, the team gives it
a microshock of electricity to fuse them together, and
then another minuscule jolt - a sort of jump-start - to
begin cell division. When the cells begin dividing, they
are transferred to the mother’s womb, just as in any
ordinary fertility treatment.

In February 1999 Koteas and Walken determined that
they had intact cell samples from the Hytners* dead child,
and the two scientists approached the couple with the
idea of, in Koteas’s words, “giving them back their child
- this time, the way she should have been when she w as
born” The Hytners were resistant at first, still in iso ►

GO FORTH

As most of the world now knows, G. Richard Seed, Harvard
graduate, career physicist, and rogue scientist, aims to
change the course of human evolution. He intends to done
us, and the government be damned. But pulling a complete
human from his DNA top hat is only part of the trick Seed
daims to be capable of. ft*s the peripheral knowledge -
the intellectual fallout from cloning - that really revs
Seed's engine: in his vision, human cloning isn't just about
making spare copies of yourself, it's about providing rapid
cures for a host of diseases, including cancer, and . . . well,
maybe you'd better hear this for yourself. Wired caught
up with the peripatetic Seed at his home in Chicago.

- Richard Kadrey

"First of all, I believe in God, Second, I'm a Christian.

Third, I'm a Methodist, a very serious Methodist. The
Bible says that God made Man in his own image. The
Bible also says that Man will become one with God.

To explain this, let me digress a little; During the first
few hundred years of the Christian church, there were
constant arguments and debates. One of the big argu¬
ments was about the resurrection of Christ. Was the
resurrection in spirit or was the resurrection in body?

This was a schism of major proportions. It was settled
around the third century, and the resolution was that
Christ was resurrected in both spirit and body. This is
still the doctrine in Christian churches all over the
world. The same interesting question is present now.

When God intends to meet Man with himself, is that
in spirit or in body? I choose the interpretation that it
includes spirit and body both. Human cloning is one
small step in that direction.

You can now seriously contemplate unlimited life
extension and unlimited access to knowledge. The Scot¬
tish cloning experiments proved that you can reprogram
the DNA in cells back to division zero - back to undifferen¬
tiated cells. If we can learn to reprogram DNA back from
division 30 to division 1 5, that would be great. You're
going to be 20 years old again! And we could repeat
that as many times as you'd want It's mind boggling.

But I'm really interested in more immediate applica¬
tions. What if we took a cancerous cell of the same type
used in Scotland - a mammary-gland epithelial \$2 ►

WIRED MARCH 1998

usm

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Crop Circles

Steve Alexander began photograph¬
ing crop circles after he witnessed a
ball of light over a field in Wiltshire,
England. These nine shots date from
1994 through 1997 and are available,
for a price, at alpha.mk.dundee.ac.uk
/ft/aop_ drdes/XCE R TS/ste ve.h tm L
Indeed, for every attempt to explain
these mysterious patterns' origins -
plasma vortex, military experiment,
alien spaceship landing - there are
a thousand "experts" ready to sell
you their theory. Curiously, no one
has yet spotted a formation resem¬
bling the dollar sign, - Tom Chburn

WIRED MARCH

Wired: How has computer science contributed to the field
of evolutionary psychology?

Pinker: Traditional evolutionary explanations of the mind
have been very crude, relying on things like territorial
imperative” and “sex drive ” Given the complexity and
richness of human thought, that's not a satisfactory
answer. But if what evolved is a complex set of informa¬
tion processing mechanisms - neural circuitry designed
for intricate computation - then you can have both the
richness of human thought and a scientific framework
to make sense of it.

So the brain is a naturally evolved neural computer.

Who shares that view?

Virtually everyone in cognitive science, from Marvin
Minsky to Noam Chomsky; It!s actually easier to point
to the people who think the brain is not a neural com¬
puter - they are flamboyant, though few in number and
unrepresentative.

It’s hard to ignore that our brains are made of infor¬
mation processors. Down to a neuron's axon and mole¬
cules, the nerve cell is designed to be an information
carrier. Too often we think of neurons as bean counters,
but they're much more like sophisticated chips or micro¬
computers. And if neurons are like chips, when you wire
up a hundred billion of them yon get a very powerful
computational device. That's the only explanation for
how a hunk of matter can do intelligent things - unless
you think there's a special kind of substance necessary
for intelligence, which would mean robots and artificial
intelligence cannot be created.

Does this mean that to build smart machines we should
study the evolution of the human brain?

The answer is an emphatic yes. Nature has been doing
R&D much longer than humans, and engineers often
learn from the natural wrorld. For example, composite
materials like fiberglass or carbon fiber, which embed
filaments in a matrix, are based on the design of wood.
Genetic algorithms are obviously based on natural selec¬
tion. And stereop holography* used in aerial reconnais¬
sance, is based on stereovision in animals.

Whether working with neurons or transistors, is there only
one way to make a developed brain?

That is the question of artificial intelligence. Some scien¬
tists suggest there may be only one way to build an intel¬
ligent device, and. therefore, if we build one ourselves
we will automatically learn about the human mind. My
sentiment is that in general there's more than one way
to skin a cat - there are almost always multiple algo¬
rithms, In biological evolution, you often find different
solutions to a given problem - compound eyes in arthro¬
pods versus camera-like vertebrate eyes, internal versus
external skeletons, and so on.

Harvey Blume (joel@ai.mit.edu) often writes on culture
and new media. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Not everything about the brain is perfect. Mental "noise"
often clouds our memory of details and facts. What func¬
tion does this serve?

Noise - because it is noise, because it's not systematic
- is hard to pinpoint. Our faulty memory, for example,
might be noise, or it might he the result of a trade-off.

If the brain was a perfectly accurate information pro¬
cessor, our heads could be too big to cany around on
our necks. Or we might starve to death because the
brain would eat up two-thirds of our daily caloric
intake. Also, if we remembered absolutely everything,
it could he like one of those Internet searches where
you type in a keyword and get 6,000 matches. What
we think of as bugs in memoiy might
instead be features; maybe the most
relevant, most useful piece of infor¬
mation is simply what pops into our
mind first.

Won't people object to the idea that
our minds are neural networks, noth¬
ing more or less than complex compu¬
tational devices?

There is resistance. A number of
moral notions, such as free will,
hinge on our not being just data-
processing machines.

How does evolutionary psychology
define free will?

Free will is not a scientific concept:
it means “not caused by anything,”
and the scientific worldview can only
seek causes. It is a moral concept -
an idealization of human beings for
the purpose of moral reasoning that
designates certain kinds of behavior
as those for which people ought to
be held responsible. Which kinds?

Roughly, those that involve the
higher decisionmaking circuits of
the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex, which can be
influenced by knowledge of the consequences of certain
ty pes of behavior and other people's opinions of those
behaviors.

We have to go on trying to apply scientific reasoning
to human behavior. But we also have to remember that
ethical reasoning is in a separate sphere that cannot and
should not be confused with science.

Is this what you mean when you write in How the Mind
Works that certain kinds of problems are hard for us to
resolve "because the mind of Homo sapiens lacks the
cognitive equipment to solve them"?

Right, It has to do with a limitation of our abilities to
conceptualize. Maybe Martians could explain things like
free will to us. But if they did, we might not understand
the explanation. ■ ■ ■

Steven Pinker's best-selling book. The
Language Instinct (1994), provided
a lucid description of the human brain's
amazing linguistic capabilities and
showed how language arose in the
course of evolution. In his controversial
How the Mind Works (1997), Pinker stalks
even bigger game: the mind itself.

Pinker argues that we should "reverse-
engineer" the brain - figuring out what
natural selection designed it to do in the
environment in which we evolved. Along
the way, he breathes new life into old
theories - that the mind is a machine,
that human nature is shaped by natural
selection. He also debunks conventional
thinking - that parents socialize their
young, that we acquire reading, math,
and higher skills instincfualJy. His find¬
ings, both big and small, have broad-
reaching implications for how we live our
lives, H7red caught up with Pinker at MIT,
where he is a professor and director of
the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.

QBE

WIRED MARCH 1998

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‘siaaai Maa OaiaOisap pae aaiGaa su Oaiqaeq Ag

ssaipuegavu puieg Ag

un-and-knife show! Something for all the family!"
screams a billboard as Sverre Kvernmo cuts through
downtown Dallas in his dented BMW.

It's 103 degrees on a hot, thick day. Kvernmo
cruises past a rotating restaurant shaped like a huge golf ball,
peppered with lights and perched on a stick 580 feet high .In
the distance a flag-bedecked castle and a replica of an Indian
fortress peek through the haze. Crazy place, Dallas.

The LBJ Freeway slices between skyscrapers built by big oil
and, more recently, Ross Perot. The Texas Commerce Tower, the
second-tallest structure in town, is famous for having a hole
in the middle - on purpose. The building's penthouse is even
better known in other circles because of its resident - John
Romero, owner of Ion Storm and cocreator of Doom and Quake.
Six blocks down, on a touristy promenade just a gunshot away
from a certain notorious book depository, resides Ritual Enter¬
tainment, maker of a Quake- powered game called Sin. Nearby
Garland, Texas, is home to Apogee Software, creator of Duke
Nukem 3D. A couple of miles south, in Mesquite, lies id Soft¬
ware, where Romero's erstwhile partner John Carmack contin¬
ues to tap the profits of Doom. "That," Kvernmo says, "is where
it ail started " A grimy Holiday Inn sails by.

It's all here in this lO-mlle stretch of asphalt that links Dallas's
latest booming industry: the 10-gallon paychecks, the double
deals, the internecine digital warfare. Indeed, the high-stakes
gamesmanship is what makes Sverre Kvernmo call this gun-
and-knife city home. He is a "Doom Baby," raw gamemaking
talent spawned by Doom's release four years ago.

In the early '90s, Kvernmo was cleaning hospital hallways in
Norway. Now he builds virtual environments for shoot-'em-ups.
In a world gone 3-D crazy, he has become one of the industry's
most valuable commodities.

Tm being paid to do exactly what I want!" the 26-year-old
shouts. "I can't believe Tm here. I'm from a town north of the
polar circle in Norway - really exciting/' he scoffs. "I would
probably be killing whales or something if It weren't for the

Internet and
Doom ”

In 1991 Doom arose from Dallas and went
supernova, at once Game as Mifflon-Dollar
Revenue Machine and Game as Open System. Its code was
semHntentionally left ajar on release. A couple of signposts,
a few backdoors, and some secret passages into its structure
- enough to inspire a fevered community of hackers to dissect,

David McCandless (dmacca#cix.co.uk) is a London-based
freelance writer and musician.

reverse-engineer, and completely redesign the game thou¬
sands of times over.

Hacking Doom swiftly became a massive underground indus¬
try - gigabytes of add-ons, graphics, and levels were passed
around the planet. By letting code and schematics filter into
the public domain, id effectively licensed its game to the world.

Kvernmo, in the meantime, became a lord in Doom's ama¬
teur fiefdom. For if manipulating the engine was an art, level
design - a combination of hard coding and high design - was
its purest form. Sure, the engine powers the game and handles
the placement of every entity - the chain guns, the moaning
zombies, the blood-soaked walls. It defines the physics, creates
the sound, and makes sure everything is combined in a seam¬
less world. But here's a dirty little secret: an engine by itself
is just a piece of mechanics. The game experience comes down
to the enclosed environments where you do your fighting,
exploring, and dying. The maps. The levels.

Of the hundreds of would-be level lords, only a handful
showed true promise. Thanks to the Net, experts like Kvernmo
swiftly became celebrities in their own crazy comer of game
land. Adopting comic-book names like Dr Sleep, Paradox, and
Cranium to increase their mystique, they spent days turned
months turned years obsessively honing their skills.

Doom spawned these skilled fanatics, but it was id's next
game, Quakef that reared them Into professional talent. For
while they ferreted away on the amateur scene, the fabled
egos at id, John Romero and John Carmack, had split. Eccentric
designer and game lover Romero left to form Ion Storm and
begin work on one of its first product, the time-travel epic
Daikatana . King coder and tech lover Carmack remained to
pursue ever more revolutionary pro¬
gramming feats, all to be expressed
in id's Quake U.

Meanwhile, other companies set
about licensing the Quake engine as a
platform for their own games. Almost
overnight, demand for skilled design¬
ers triggered a feeding frenzy, id was

there offering jobs to the
very talent it had created.
So was Ion Storm. So were
the checkbooks of publish¬
ers like Activision, Sierra
On-Line, and Eidos Inter¬
active. And in the middle
of it all, the Doom Babies.

wo years ago, Kvernmo left his native Norway to study
art in Bristol, England. He barely made it to lectures,
though, because he was addicted to Doom . Not just play¬
ing the game - changing it, building ever more convoluted
killing arenas. "For three months solid I worked late into the
night, fell asleep, woke up early, and started ail over again."

When Oaam was
released in 1993,
its cnde was left
semi-intentionally
alar - far enough
to inspire hackers
to dissect,
reverse-engineer,
and completely
redesign the
game thousands
of time over.

Quake n [left to right]:
getting ready to launch
grenades at a gladiator;
a drop-ship prepares
Id tire pods toward
certain doom; relying
on a rail gun to tight
through the jail level.

WIRED MARCH 1998

Mis levels, meanwhile, traveled at warp speed through the
wires, siphoned off to every corner of the globe. Kvernmo was
soon spotted and snapped up by LA-based game developer
Xatrix Entertainment. Despite the remonstrations of his par¬
ents, he flew out and joined the design team for a Doom-
m eets -Deliverance title, Redneck Rampage .

Six months later, John Romero called. "He really wanted
me to be a part of his new project," Kvernmo says, "and it
was Romero, phoning me, I, we - all of us - loved Romero."

Beyond the allure of the fat paycheck, "creativity and design
were the focus of Ion Storm, so it seemed like the perfect place
to work," Kvernmo says. "I had to go /' He completed the final
leg of his pilgrimage in March 1997, arriving in Dallas to find
that his contemporaries had already made the journey.

Ion Storm is not just the domain of twentynothings, however.

John W, Anderson (aka Dr Sleep)
works in a booth alongside Kvernmo.
Forty-one and graying, he brought his

Dead," was the first eight-level episode of Doom - regarded as
the seminal work, it's still played by tens of millions of people
worldwide. His artistry, eccentricity, obsession with a good
death match, and pop-star looks made Romero the public face
of Doom, the frontman for thousands of adoring nerds.

"For us," says Anderson, "Romero was id."

"I really wanted to be with Romero," Kvernmo confesses.

Sitting in a small booth opposite Kvernmo, Romero is play¬
ing a "milkmatdi"- a deathmatch with a twist "Whoever loses
the best of two out of three has to drink rotten milk out of
a jug that's been sitting there for months," Romero explains,
laughing maniacally. His eyes are rooted to the screen. "You
pour it into a big cup. It comes out in like yellow blocks."

Romero clearly
loves what he
does and goes at
it with a shrewd
yet childlike

Baikatana (left to rifiltl):
a satyr guards a temple
an the isle at Crete;
Inside a regal grand hall
in ine palace nn Knossos;
the futuristic Benetran
Research Center, where
the cure fnr AIDS is
discovered in 2030.

baby grand piano from
Pennsylvania so he could
play Schumann when not
building classical Greek-inspired Daikatana maps.

Like Kvernmo s mania, Anderson's obsession with Doom
changed his life. The fixation first drew him out of the Penn¬
sylvania Department of Public Welfare to the Action Games
Forum on CompuServe, which, in 1994, had become a mecca
for Doom heads and architectural aspirants. At its height, any¬
one who was anyone in the community hung out there.

Within weeks of Doom's shareware release in December 1993,
map editors appeared, allowing items to be repositioned, floors
to be raised or lowered. Yet the first levels were mere rework¬
ings of the existing maps - nobody had sufficiently reverse-
engineered the technology to start new levels from scratch.

The breakthrough came three months later, when a group
of students working at England's University of Bradford com¬
bined the efforts of hackers worldwide and cracked the final
layer of Doom's map format. They recompiled the BSP tree -
a mathematical representation of a 3-D level - which allowed
them to reconstruct the geometry of the maps. And that was
it. Building on the existing work of amateur hacker Brendon
Wyber, Belgian student Raphael Quinet built a level editor
called DEU around an algorithm and uploaded it March 30,
1994. Literally overnight, the first all-new levels arrived and
the community was in place. Levels swamped FTP sites and
CompuServe file libraries.

These new worlds, though, were only outposts in the universe
created by John Romero. He is the first 3-D level designer, the
Yoda of the Doom Babies. Romero's opus, "Knee Deep in the

intensity. "Kvernmo s so cool," he says, wide-
eyed. "And we've got Dr Sleep, He's cool, too/'
It's not boasting or a marketing ploy. Romero
is genuinely excited by the talent that sur¬
rounds him. But then, he played hard to get it.
"He said: 'Pack your stuff and come down/" recalls Anderson.
"'What, next week?' I asked. Ho,' he said, Tut your stuff in a car
and come down now/" Two days later. Dr Sleep settled into one
of Romero's many spare rooms.

Like deathmatchlng, game design is a bloodthirsty business.
It's an industry that has already jumped into Hollywood's billion-
dollar bracket. How, with more than a jug of rotten milk at
stake, Romero is playing a bigger match - against his former
colleagues at id, and against the many companies that have
licensed the Quake engine as the backbone of new games.

"Why bother paying the best guys in the universe to build
you a brand-new game engine when you can hire one?" says
Romero. "Everyone can have John Carmack working for them "
Well, not everyone, If you're making less than US$5,000
a month from Quake t you have nothing to fear. However, id
claims 12.5 percent of your net income over that amount. And
if you license the Quake engine for your own title, it comes
with a hefty price tag, currently around $500,000. The flat fee
is negotiable, depending on royalty agreements, but either
way, a percentage of every Quake engine game sold goes to id.

id had additional incentive to tighten the financial reins.

"A shitty cottage industry sprang up out of Doom" explains
Kvernmo," Loads of people were doing crap maps or collecting
them off the Internet and then sticking them on a CD and sell¬
ing them for like 40 bucks each/'

Poor-quality maps meant bad PR for Doom, Ironically, the
profusion of crappy levels created huge demand for i m *

WIRED MARCH 1990

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Wired: My father's life, when he was my age, was not much differ¬
ent from mine in its daily routine. Is change slowing down?

Drucker: I’ve been telling people for 30 years that material
changes in our lives are almost irrelevant. The important
changes are demographic, in health care and education. The
demographic revolution of the last 40 years is unprecedented.
Today, the majority of people around the world live in cities.
Urbanization changes your worldview. So, the real change is
in meaning, not in goods.

What can we expect to happen because of these changes?

Thirty years from now, the big cities may be dying very fast.
Downtown office buildings have become dysfunctional. As infor¬
mation and ideas have become mobile, the kind of work that
doesn't require contact with customers or contact with other
professionals - in other words, 75 percent of the work in any
organization - doesn't have to be done downtown. For 300 -odd
years we have had a continuing, occasionally interrupted real
estate boom. It was slowed down by depression, but not stopped.
That boom may be over for good.

Asia is disagreeing with you. They are building super high-rises.

Malaysia, for instance, is committed to building the world's most
disagreeable city. TheyTe building megalomaniac skyscrapers,
the biggest mosque, and the biggest traffic jams. It isn't just the
old cities that have become nightmares. The new ones are just
as bad.

Do you agree that the influence of government is withering?

Government is a growth industry. With all the talk about cutting
government, the governmental share of the total gross national
product has actually grown steadily in the last 20 years. It’s now
about a third or more all over the world. Business - the produc¬
tion of goods and services for consumption - as a share of the
gross national product has been going downhill steadily since
1900, All of business, including farming, is shrinking at the rate
of perhaps 1 percent a year, compounded.

So business is waning and government is rising!

Look, France under Louis XIV or XV had probably 4,000 central
government employees in total. When people talk of Versailles,
they think it was an enormous, luxurious castle. Actually, it was
a small, squalid office building. The royal quarters were no larger
than my house. I have a big house, 2,500 square feet because
both my wife and 1 work at home. Rut the king of France didn't
have much more. The rest of Versailles was unbelievably squalid
office space in which the families of the government employees
lived in corners of rooms, without indoor toilets. Yon couldn't

even fit a small bureaucracy in Versailles. _

Since 1900 the growth areas have been government, education,
and health care. Government, which has been growing, may stop
growing. We may be at the crest.

Do you believe there's a growing gap between the rich and the
poor in America?

The way you phrase it, the answer is no. The gap is quite differ-
ent. There is a growing gap between people with advanced edu¬
cation and people without. The difference in income for an

Kevin Kelly {kevin@wired.com) is Wired's executive editor.

Afro-American with a college degree is statistically insignificant
(if you adjust for age and length of service) from the income of
a white, Latino, or Asian with a college degree. Up to about 1970
it was economically nonrational to go to college - in other words,
you did better economically by not going to college and instead
getting a unionized job in the mass -production industiy. But
those kinds of jobs are disappearing. And since those jobs were
relatively disproportionately filled by blacks, it hurts the black
community most. So the gap is almost 100 percent educational.

Is capitalism changing?

At the height of his fortune, J. P. Morgan was probably worth
one- third of what Bill Gates is worth now, adjusted for inflation.
Out of his own pocket, X P. Morgan could finance all of America's
economic needs (except residential housing) for four months.
Bill Gates's US$36 billion would let him finance America for
maybe two days. The rich no longer matter. TheyTe celebrities,
not capitalists anymore. The real capitalists are the middle-class
people who put $25,000 into a mutual fund - that's many trillions
of dollars.

Do you favor antitrust action against
Microsoft?

The main mission of American
antitrust efforts has always been to
bring a suit when the monopoly is just
about over. Historical leaders like
Microsoft are very vulnerable to miss¬
ing a strategic turn. If youTe that far
out and that dominant, you have no
friends. YouTe exposed. But when you
get in trouble, you need Mends.

Microsoft is in an exposed position,
and it takes just one major mistake,
one major messing up of a major
turning point, and then nobody will
lift a finger to help them.

Is Microsoft going to bo the next IBM?

The probability is yes. Actually, there is an outsize probability
that Microsoft may be tomorrow's Control Data, which essentially
disappeared.

Thirty years ago, I began to doubt IBM's model, but for the
wrong reasons technologically. I didn't see the PC coming any
more than anybody else. I saw the likelihood of the computer
approaching either the telephone or the TV set or both. Which
it didn't do - yet. Instead, we got the PC.

Are there any theories of information economics you respect?
Current economics is merely refining the obsolete. Economic
theory is still based on the scarcity axiom, which doesn't apply
to information. When T sell yon a phone, I no longer have it.
When 1 sell information to you, 1 have more information by the
very fact that you have it and I know you have It. That's not even
true of money.

Do you think there is anything to this idea of a network economy?

In any community in transition, it is more important whom
you know than what you know. That's the right definition of
networking, m m m

If Marshall McLuhan is Wired' s
patron saint, then Peter Drucker
should be its official oracle.
Drucker has the great advantage
over McLuhan in that, at age 83,
he is still as astute and timely as
ever. And because Drucker is a
historian who also gets his hands
dirty with real-life management
issues, he has a reputation in
the business world that is truly
Olympian. Kevin Kelly made his
annual trek to Drucker's ranch
home in Southern California to
hear what the oracle is uttering
these days.

OSD

WIRED MARCH 1998

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ft's 10:25 on a steamy;
late-summer morning in central
Florida, and I'm standing on a nar¬
row steel catwalk surrounded by
an old-growth forest of American
historical figures: Ben Franklin,

Will Rogers, Susan B. Anthony, Fred¬
erick Douglass, and a dozen others.
We're waiting for the morning run-
through to begin. And it's dark down
here below the stage, save for the
glow from green and amber indi¬
cator lights.

Bruce Long, a Disney Imagineer
who is in charge of "show quality"'
at the company's six theme parks
around the world, is standing next
to me, "Make sure you don't lean
over the rails here, or you'll shut
down the show," he says. "We've
got indicators that keep an
eye on that, so you don't get
hurt by any of the hydraulic
lifts going up and down/'

Long shoots me a look that
lets me know I'm infinitely
less predictable than his cast of
audio-animatronic figures.Then he
gives the cue for two technicians
to fire the show before guests
begin streaming through the gates
of Epcot Center's World Showcase
at 11 a.m.

Up above my head, powerful
speakers begin to spout patriotic
music "America did not exist,"
intones Ben Franklin, launching into
a 30-minute history lesson that
Disney has dubbed The American
Adventure. All around me, latex-
skinned icons of the nation's past
get their cues from a magnetic tape
loop and spring to life. Thomas
Jefferson drafts the Declaration of
Independence. Franklin Roosevelt
delivers a rousing rendition of "The
only thing we have to fear is fear
itself." A giant tray that holds every

Animatroirics cost
$25,000 for a
generic model and
up to $1 million for
the most elaborate
characters.

prop and figure used in the show -
Long refers to it as "the war wagon"
- slides slowly toward the back of
the theater. Long, a 26-year Disney
veteran, watches the proceedings
with the casual intensity of a jeweler.
His job is make sure that Disney's
Industrial-strength illusions stay
convincing enough to keep the
crowds coming - and the dollars
pouring in - 12 hours a day, 365
days a year. Imagineering isn't a bad
word for what he does - whimsy,
perfectionism, and sleekly efficient
capitalism all rolled into one.

"D'jou see that?" Long asks as
Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Gra¬

ham Bell, Susan B> Anthony, and
Mark Twain rise up to stage level.
"The middle lift there was doggin'"

I have to shake my head. I didn't
notice anything - and when the
audience arrives, it's not likely any¬
one else will, either. But Long, with
a glance, can pick out "slop" in a
robot's finger movements or the
"steppiness"in an arm sweep. Right
now, The American Adventure is
doing pretty well. Of the 81 1 ani¬
mated functions on Long's checklist
- every hydraulically powered nod
and wave, plus smoke effects, light¬
ing, and projections - the only prob¬
lem is that sticky lift. The rating:

99.1 4 percent, up from the last
assessment's mediocre 98.2 percent.

It's serious business running the
most sophisticated virtual world
ever created. Put on your best VR
goggles and gloves, hook up to the
high-powered workstation of your
choice, and you'll never come close
to what US$42 a day ($34, if you're
9 or under) gets you at one of the
theme parks people like Bruce Long
put together. Disney has the kind of
control over visitors' experiences -
what they see, smell, hear, and feel
- that videogame builders can only
dream of. Bran Ferren, Imagineer-
ing's executive vice president and a

WIRED MARCH 1993

□ 60

IMAGE; NO&MAtl MAUSKOPF

IMAGE! NORMAN MAU5KOPF

Tfie first Disney anim^V
tronic attraction was the
Enchanted Tiki Room at
Disneyland in Anaheim,
California. It opened in
1963 and features 225
singing flowers, tiki
£3 gods, and birds.

to produce Walt's dream of "plussed-up" reality

AMERICAN

EXPRESS

hsi: Y ORDERS

Sleepy time down South: each
hydraulically powered wave and
nod is refined beforehand on hybrid
agimatronic figures (opposite):
locals listen to FDR's New Deal on
the radio in The American Adventure

Source: Disney's Information
Services Department

former Hollywood f/x master, knows
as much about state-of-the-art iliu-
sionmaking as anyone alive today.
But Disneyland, he says, was built in
1955 "at a higher resolution with
bricks and mortar than
we can do using bits
today,"

Like its purely digital
counterparts, Disney's
aim is to envelop visi¬
tors -40 million a year
to Florida's Walt Disney
World alone - in a seamless enter¬
tainment experience. "When you
come into our park, you should
leave the distractions of the outside

About 5,000 working
parts make up the
A100 robot, allowing
the lifelike figure to
perform 44 different
movements.

world behind," says Greg Em men
vice president of the Magic King¬
dom and a Disney cast member
{there are no employees here) since
1968. "All this technology is just a
means to present
shows and tell stories."

Show is a key word
in the Disney lexicon.
From the moment
guests (never "cus¬
tomers") steer their
shiny rental cars onto
the 47 -square-mile property south-
west of Orlando, they're part of a
m o n u me nta I p rod ucti on . The 44, 000
cast members all have "roles" - even

the toll-booth attendant who hands
you a guidebook as he collects the
$5 parking fee.

The Imagmeers - based at Dis¬
ney's Glendale, California, head¬
quarters - don't wa nt you to j ust
step inside their world and wander
around, They want to entertain you.
They want to direct your attention
like a master magician, mount par¬
ades that force you to stand and
gawk, and engineer enough distrac¬
tions into a queue area to almost
make you overlook that you've
waited more than an hour in the
blazing sun for the privilege of
climbing Into a fiberglass log and

plunging down an artificial waterfall.

Every sort of show is a manufac¬
tured experience - lines are written
in a script, stage directions mapped
out, the lighting cues carefully
rehearsed But Disney's theme parks
take the concept of "show" to a new
level. This is an alternate reality, a
set of illusions so complete that
people happily immerse themselves
for days - and come back again for
more. Indeed, so compelling are
Disney's virtual worlds that the real
world has begun turning to the
Imagineers for help in reaching its
own full Disneyesque potential. The
Mouse now stages Fourth of July

WIRED MARCH 1 9 9 S

More than
750 Gbytes of

up every day
(5 terabytes
a month)

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fireworks and parades for towns "off
property" (as the outside world is
known), and Imagineers are leading
the redevelopment of that dingiest
of Main Streets, New York's Times
Square. Disney put a megastore on
42nd Street and renovated the his¬
toric New Amsterdam Theater, then
threw a massive parade in midtown
Manhattan last summer to celebrate
the release of Hercules. For those

seeking total immersion, the com¬
pany even offers real estate in its
own town, the nostalgia-enhanced
planned community called Celebra¬
tion Just outside Orlando. After
more than 40 years in the theme-
park business, Disney's enhanced
reality is proving too attractive for
the real world to resist.

But the Disney parks in central
Florida are still the unchallenged

champs of "plussed-up" reality, to
use a term that Walt loved to toss
around. This is a nice euphemism for
strategy worthy of a military cam¬
paign: no chewing gum is sold here,
so you won't wind up with a wad
on the bottom of your shoe; you're
never more than 30 or so yards from
a rest room, even when wandering
the streets of a 19th-century gold
rush town. "Disney World shows you

how seductive life can be in a situa¬
tion that's totally controlled," says
Stephen Fjellman, a Florida Interna¬
tional University anthropologist and
author of the book Vinyl Leaves:
Walt Disney World and America. The
heart of Disney's success, Fjellman
observes, is the masterful subtlety
with which it wields near-total con¬
trol over the guest's experience.

In fact, technology dominates

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Bells and whistles: George Smith
(opposite) orchestrates a parade^Qn ^

Main Street from Central Engineering; 0

fireworks above Cinderella Castle,

Disney enchantment. "Backstage" at
the company's parks, low -light cam¬
eras and motion sensors monitor
mischief-minded guests in dark
rides like The Haunted Mansion.
Uniformed men pushing gas-powered
vacuum cleaners show up after
every parade to make the confetti
disappear. A barcoded wardrobe
system uses a supermarket-style
scanner to check out every item

of clothing that every
cast member wears
and later check every piece
back in for laundering. A corporate
intranet helps keep cast members
informed so they can better answer
guest questions {a favorite: "What
time does the 3 p,m. parade start?").
An infrared network even hooks up
cash registers in popcorn carts to a
pa rk's fi n a n c i a 1-re porti ng system .

120,000 email
messages a day
handled by
company servers

It's ail designed to be
unobtrusive and nearly
invisible. But as a native
Miamian who grew up going to the
parks, that's what I really wanted to
see. So I put a call in to Disney pub¬
lic relations, asking about access to
the cast members who run Walt
Disney World and the places they
work. Disney came back with one
stipulation: discussions about park

security were off-limits. Otherwise
- to my amazement - they agreed,

I'm cruising past the secu¬
rity guard who monitors
^access to the service area
behind the Magic Kingdom, Follow¬
ing the road around the outskirts of
Main Street and Tomorrowland, we
pull in to a small parking fot behind
Fantasyland.This is one of the main

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WIRED MARCH 1 9 9 S

entrances to the Utilidor [utility corridor). Rather
than being underground, the Utilidor is actually
the first floor of the park; In Florida, the water
table is never far from the surface, so a real base¬
ment isn't practical. We enter the tunnel. It's hard
not to be surprised by how different the back-
stage areas are from what the guests see. The
rendering is much lower-res back here - gray
paint, poured concrete floors, and plain fluores¬
cent lights.

It's also hard not to notice how dramatically
the Utilidor shrinks things. Upstairs, Disney deploys
every illusion in its formidable repertoire to make
the park seem vast and spread out, to separate
19th-century Main Street from 21st-century
Tomorrowland.

Here, itJs efficiency
they're after, and
no two points in
the park are more
than a 10-minute
walkapart.And if
you're really in a
hurry, you can grab
an electric golf cart.

The Utilidor
enables cast mem¬
bers to don their
costumes (not
"uniforms") and
report to their
stations without
having to negoti¬
ate the crowds
upstairs. And it
allows technicians
easy access to the guts of the park. Wiring and
piping run along the ceiling; on a recent hot
summer afternoon, a pair of techies were
installing a new fiber-optic line without break¬
ing a sweat. Every 1 5 minutes or so, a sound
like a tornado whirls by overhead: that's the
park's vacuum-powered garbage system, suck¬
ing another batch to a central processor.

The Utilidor would baffle the hel! out of a
5-year-old. Snow White and Alice walk by In
street clothes, identifiable only by their wigs and
heavy makeup. A woman in Pluto feet shuffles
toward the Fantasyland cafeteria, dad in a Dis-
ney-issue gray T-shirt and shorts. Seven familiar¬
looking dwarf heads hang from a concrete wall.
At the mouth of the Utllidor,a Tomorrowland
cast member smokes a butt and unwinds.

In front of a door marked Engineering Central,
we stop to wait for clearance. A biometric hand

reader on the wall, made by a company called
Recognition Systems, scans the size and shape
of your fingers, compares them with a template
stored in a database, and makes up its mind
about whether you're entitled to access. We're
not in the database, so we hit the intercom
buzzer instead After a few moments, an elderly
woman pushes open the door and announces,
"Door's broken. Come on in."

Inside, behind a bank of PCs and VT220 ter¬
minals, a handful of cast members monitor not
just the operations of the Magto Kingdom's
attractions, but also food-storage freezers, water
pumps and wells, and lighting, fire-detection,
and security systems.This is the Centra! Console.

"We try to catch things
before they go 101,"
says service manager
George Smith, using the
Disney code for "offline."
As if on cue, an alarm
goes off. "That means
there's something
wrong with one of the
motors at Tomorrow-
land Transit Authority,"
Smith says, referring to
an open-air passenger
train powered by about
450 linear-induction
motors. "Everything that
comes in gets logged so
we can analyze it later."

The Central Console
includes a PC with a
graphic display of all
the juice that the Florida Power & Light Company
is feeding to Walt Disney World. "We get a lot of
power glitches from thunderstorms," explains
Nick Blackwell, Engineering Central's manager.
"And occasionally there are outages, despite the
fact that we have redundant backup substations.
If we lose power to Small World, we get an alarm
here, and then we can troubleshoot it and see
what the cause is. If we need to, we pick up the
hot line to the folks at Reedy Creek Energy Ser¬
vices/ part of the Reedy Creek Improvement
District, a nominally governmental body that
Disney created (with approval from Florida's
eager legislators) to oversee its property. Reedy
Creek has its own two generators - gas turbine
and steam turbine - and enough leeway from
Florida's tourism-hungry state government in
Tallahassee to build a nuclear plant if Disney
so desires. tae ►

DiSney Dollar$

Walt Disney Company
Annual Revenue
CUSS billions)

Disney Theme Parks
and Resorts
Annual Revenue

Source: The Walt Disney Company

5.8

mo 1985 1990

1995 2000

We the People

As a PhD candidate in artificial
intelligence at Carnegie Mellon,
Astro Teller decided to explore the
many faces of American culture.
Armed with databases, a digital
camera, and face-recognition soft¬
ware, Teller and designer Christo¬
pher Pacione created Jedermann,
a two-part collection of composite
portraits. The first features visitors
to a Pittsburgh gallery and a Web
site { www. cs. emu. edu/afs/cs. cm u
,edu fuser fas trofmosak/JEDERMANN
.htmf). The second focuses on vari¬
ous cultural icons; pictured here is
a composite of sitting US Democra¬
tic senators. "The collective visages
act as psychological mirrors/ Teller
tells us/This is the friendly, make-
you-f eel-included face of someone
trying to prove tie's one of us/

- Rachel Lehmann-Haupt

WIRED MARCH 1998

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auafing

hortly before dawn on a dismal, rain-drenched winter morning
Pm heading out of Helsinki along Highway 3, into the heart of

Finland, This obscure nation is an underpopulated wilderness
sandwiched like a DM2 between Russia and Sweden, extending
all the way up into the Arctic Circle, The sun barely sets here
in the summer, while in the winter, it barely rises. I can't imag-
W ine why anyone would visit Finland in the dark months, unless
motivated by some strange need to go skiing in perpetual twilight
.. . but my grueling pilgrimage has nothing to do with snow. Fve
come in search of a singular individual, a reclusive, elusive Russian
emigre scientist named Eugene Podkletnov, who claims that he can
defy the force of gravity.

Five years ago, while testing a superconducting ceramic disc
by rotating it above powerful electromagnets, Podkletnov noticed
something extremely strange. Small objects above the disc seemed
to lose weight, as Lf they were being shielded front the pull of Planet
Earth. The weight reduction was small - around 2 percent - but
nothing like this had ever been observed before. If the shielding
effect could be refined and intensified, the implications would be
immense. In Fact, practical, affordable gravity nullification could
change our lives more radically than the invention of the internal
combustion engine.

Imagine a future in which vehicles can levitate freely.

Highways and railroads become obsolete, airplanes no longer
need wings, and oceangoing ships can be broken up for scrap, indus¬
tries in which large masses have to be transported or supported -
from mining to construction - are revolutionized. Citizens gain
unprecedented mobility, transcending all geographical and national
harriers.

Meanwhile, space travel is now safe, cheap, and fast. Resources
can be mined in the asteroid belt and shipped to factories relocated

in orbit around Earth, freeing our planet from pollution and green¬
house-gas emissions. Ultimately the old dream of colonizing other
worlds may be realized, not just for a handful of highly trained
astronauts but for millions of everyday people.

Far-fetched? Indeed. Most physicists laughed at Podkletnov’s
report. Riley Newman, a professor of physics at UC Irvine who has
been involved in gravity research for 20 years, typified the reaction
when he commented, “I think it’s safe to say gravity shielding is not
conceivable.” Like many scientists, he felt that Podkletnov must have
made a mistake, measuring magnetic fields or air currents instead
of genuine weight reduction.

And yet, few of Podkietnov’s critics actually bothered to read his
description of his work. Their reaction was so dismissive, it almost
sounded like prejudice. From their perspective he was an outsider,
a nonmember of the “gravity establishment.” They couldn't believe
that a major discovery in physics had been made by such a no-status
dilettante fooling around at some obscure lab in Finland.

True, Podkletnov wasn't a physicist - but he did have a doctorate
(in materials science) and he knew how to do careful lab work.
When he wrote up his results, his papers were accepted for pub¬
lication in some sober physics journals, and at least one theoret¬
ical physicist - an Italian named Giovanni Modanese - became
intrigued. Modanese didn't dismiss the whole idea of gravity shield¬
ing, because on the subatomic level, we simply don't know how
gravity functions. “What we are lacking today,” according to Moda¬
nese, “is a knowledge of the microscopic or 'quantum' aspects of
gravity, comparable to the good microscopic knowledge we have
of electromagnetic or nuclear forces. In this sense, the microscopic
origin of the gravitational force is still unknown ” At the Max Planck
Institute in Munich, he developed a theory to explain the shielding
phenomenon.

In the United States, scientists affiliated with NASA were think¬
ing along similar lines. They obtained funding to replicate Pod-
kletnov’s experiment - but still the skeptics remained cynical and
unimpressed. The concept of gravity shielding has an aura of science-
fictional weirdness; it sounds like something out of The X-Fiks,
Indeed, Podkietnov's experiment was actually mentioned in an
episode of The X-FUes, virtually guaranteeing that most scientists
wouldn't take it seriously.

Charles Platt (cp@panix.com), a frequent contributor to Wired,
wrote “Plotting Away in Margaritaville” in Wired 5.07.

WIRED MARCH 19 98

m®

Miper-

conducting

ceramic discs

rotated above

electromagnets

shield small objects
from the

PUll of

Planet

Earth.

Podkletnov now claims that his results have been verified by
researchers at two universities - but he won’t name these people
for fear that they'll be ridiculed and ruined by the gravity establish¬
ment The team at NASA make no secret of their work - but they
have no definite results, yet* And so, at this time, the only creden-
tialed scientist claiming to have witnessed gravity modification is
Podkletnov himself*

For almost a year I’ve been wrestling with this story, which is a
journalistic nightmare, because nothing can be verified* Podkletnov
may fiave made one of the great breakthroughs of the 20th century,
or he may be suffering from a severe case of hubris coupled with
wishful thinking. In darker moments I wonder if he even exists; the
whole gravity story could be a prank by a bunch of hackers using a
fake email address and a Finnish phone number that autoforwards
calls to a dorm at MIT*

These thoughts run through my mind as I pull off Highway 3
into a rest area, crack a screw-top bottle of Vichy water, and check
my map* IPs now an hour after dawn, but the light is still so dim,
the scenery outside is all in shades of gray - as if Pm trapped inside
a monochrome TV with the brightness control stuck near zero. In
Finland in the winter, when the sky is totally choked with clouds,
the country becomes one big sensory-deprivation tank*

On the car radio some nameless station plays authentic American
bluegrass, except that the lyrics are in Finnish, which is a head¬
bending experience, the last thing I need right now* Still, having
come 5,000 miles I am determined to see this through* In just a few
hours 1 am scheduled to meet Eugene Podkletnov in person, in the
town of Tampere, where his gravity-modification experiments took
place* I will verily, if nothing else, that he does exist **. assuming
of course that I can/bid Tampere in this drizzle -soaked wilderness
of undifferentiated gloom*

potential for spaceflight almost a centuiy ago in his classic novel
The First Men in the Moon, and Wells also foresaw an avalanche of
applications on Planet Earth, creating an uneasy conflict between
pure science and pure greed* In his novel, a lone mad scientist says
he isn’t in it for the money; he just wants some recognition, and
maybe a prize or two* But then he starts to realize just how much
money could be involved. “I suppose he says thoughtfully, “no one
is absolutely averse to enormous wealth ”

Eugene Podkletnov must be aware of this - but so far, he has
reaped more pain than profit. After publishing a preliminary paper
in 1992, he wrote a more thorough paper that was rejected by more
than a dozen journals till finally it penetrated the peer-review
process at the respected British Journal of Physics-D. This seemed
to offer the recognition he was hoping for, yet instead it initiated
a career-destroying nightmare.

The trouble started when Robert Matthews, science correspondent
to the British Sunday Telegraph , got hold of the stoiy. Matthews, like
any journalist, relies on contacts, and he’s disarmingly honest about
it. “You don’t get stories by digging for them,” he now says with a
laugh. “This isn’t like Sherlock Holmes, that’s a lot of bollocks. It's
like, you hope a little brown envelope turns up in the post, and if
it does, you’re in lock."

In his case the little brown envelope contained page proofs of
Podkletnov’s paper, leaked by a man named Ian Sample who worked
on the editorial staff of the Journal of Physics-D. Although Podklet-
hoy’s paper hadn’t been published yet. Sample and Matthews
decided to break the story in the Sunday Telegraph, which printed
it on September 1, 1996* The first sentence was key: “Scientists in
Finland are about to reveal details of the world’s first antigravity
device”

Antigravity? Podkletnov never used that word; he said he’d found
a way to block gravity. Maybe this seemed a trivial distinction, but
not to the staid professors at the Institute of Materials Science in the
University of Tampere, to whom “antigravity” sounded like some¬
thing out of a bad Hollywood movie*

The director of the institute promptly denied any involvement
and declared that Podkletnov was working entirely on his own ini¬
tiative* Then the coauthor of Podkletnov’s paper claimed that his
name had been used without his knowledge - which was highly
implausible, but he stuck to his story, presumably because the insti¬
tute told him to. In the end Podkletnov had to withdraw the paper
from publication in the journal, he was abandoned by his friends,
and his credibility was impaired.

At this point I obtained Podkletnov’s phone number in Tampere
and gave him a call. He turned out to speak fluent English but was
reluctant to say anything, claiming that irresponsible journalism
had ruined his career. I gave him various assurances, faxed sam¬
ples of my work, made more calls - and finally, on November 10,
1996, he gave me a telephone interview.

WIRED MARCH 1 V9 S

He told me how he had made his discovery. “Someone in the
laboratory was smoking a pipe ” he said, “and the pipe smoke rose
in a column above the superconducting disc. So we placed a ball*
shaped magnet above the disc, altached to a balance. The balance
behaved strangely. We substituted a nonmagnetic material, silicon,
and still the balance was very strange. We Found that any object
above the disc lost some of its weight, and we found that if we
rotated the disc, the effect was increased ”

1 had no way to evaluate the truth of this, so I contacted John
Cramer, a physicist who was familiar with the story, “I don’t believe
he has discovered a shield for gravity,” Cramer told me, insisting that
huge amounts of energy would be required,

I checked back with Podkletnov. “We do not need a lot of energy”
he said, sounding irritable, as if I were wasting his lime with dumb,
obvious questions, “We don’t absorb the energy of the gravitational
field. We may be controlling it, as a transistor controls the flow of
electricity. No law of physics is broken. I am not one crazy guy in
a lab, we had a team of six or seven, all good scientists”

So who should l believe? Maybe if 1 met Podkletnov in person,

I could assess his plausibility - hut a few days later, he told me this
was impossible. In fact, be said, he had decided that he wanted no
further publicity of any kind.

This put me in an impossible position. Podkletnov had talked
to me, originally, because I pledged to publish nothing about him
without his consent. Now that he had withdrawn! his consent,

I simply had to honor my pledge. Temporarily at least, 1 abandoned
the story,

“We may he

controlling

the gravitational field.

as a transistor controls

-flow

of electricity,"
says Podkletnov.

No

law of

physics

is

Italian physicist, Giovanni Modanese, who seemed to know where

Podkletnov was hiding, but Modanese just confirmed that the reclu¬
sive Russian still wouldn’t talk. Finally, by chance, I read a Usenet
message from a 54-year-old software developer in Oregon named
Pete Skeggs, who turned out to he a pivotal figure in a newly emer¬
gent Net phenomenon: the gravity-enthusiast underground.

Skeggs had a BS in electrical engineering, a BS in computer sci¬
ence, and he loved to tinker with things. In his own little work¬
shop he had tried to replicate Podkletnov’s experiment using some
homemade electromagnets and a 1-inch superconductor that he
ordered from the Edmund Scientific mail-order catalog for US$24.95.
He didn’t get any results, but decided to start a gravity-modifica¬
tion Web page. Soon it was a huge repository of abstracts, specula¬
tion, and references, along with reports of work by other amateurs,
some of whom claimed amazing results. A man named John
Sehnurer, at Antioch College, Ohio, said that his homemade setup
could reduce the force of gravity by 2 percent on a reliable, repeat¬
able basis.

1 sent email to Sehnurer; he replied enigmatically, refusing to
divulge his home or office phone numbers and insisting that I must
page him, after which he would call me back. On September 17, 1997,
he returned one of my calls.

Aged 45, Sehnurer said he had a “strong science background ”
though he admitted he had no college degree. He claimed to have
coauthored “more than 12 peer- reviewed papers” and had spent
“more than nine years providing tech support for Armstrong Aero¬
space Medical Research Labs at Wright- Patterson Air Force Base,”
where they liad been trying to find ways for pilots to control air¬
planes via brainwave sensors. “We had a flight simulator,” Sehnurer
said, “You could sit in it and make it roll with your brainwaves”

1 Lowever, he’d been laid off in 1995 because of budget cuts, and lie
was frank about his current problems. “I don’t have any money” he
said. “Most of my equipment 1 built myself, or borrowed, or resur¬
rected.” Still, he claimed that his redesigned version of Podkletnov’s
setup was working on a routine basis and could be used onboard
Earth satellites to make small orbital corrections.

Was Sehnurer for real? lie agreed that 1 could visit him, so 1
arranged for Wired photographer Norman Mauskopf to meet me in
Ohio, A couple of days before my trip I contacted Sehnurer just to
check that there were no snags, and he assured me his apparatus
was still up and running. “I have enough liquid nitrogen for one
run, maybe two,” he said.

This made me suspicious. Two demos would be just enough to
show1 some results, while preventing a more thorough investigation.
1 sent email asking Sehnurer to obtain more liquid nitrogen. I even
told him that if he didn’t have enough money. I’d pay for it myself.

broken."

OTQ

The liquid

nitrogen

boils violently at

room temperature.

w

‘Now! says Schnurer,

lowering the

target mass

in the

Dewar flask.

Two hours later, he called me. “Can you wire me the cash via
Western Union?” he said. “1 need $150,”

Well, Td been dumb enough to make the offer, and 1 was deter¬
mined to witness a thorough trial; so I sent the money. Two days
later I was in a rented car with Norman Mauskopf, driving across
the flat farmland of Ohio to Antioch College, just south of Dayton.

We found Schnurer in a hue old red-brick residence with white-
painted casement windows and a big front porch. This turned out
not to be his home; the place had been divided into offices. Schnur-
er's workshop was in a long, thin sunroom where a white-painted
wooden bench left barely enough space for people to squeeze past
each other. The bench was strewn with components, tools, com¬
puter circuit boards, books, and looseleaf binders. At the far end
stood the Gravity Modification Machi ne.

A long wooden rod was pivoted on a nail, supported by a wooden
yoke glued to a block of plywood. A piece of string dangled from one
end of the rod, tied around a lump of scrap metal. At the other end
a tangle of fine wires ran down to some coils underneath a 1-inch
black disc - a superconductor that had been donated by a local man¬
ufacturer, thus saving Schnurer the $24.95 charged by Edmund
Scientific. When 1 asked why he had to economize so stringently,
he muttered something about his family not fully sharing his enthu¬
siasm for gravity research.

The wires from the electromagnets snaked back to a 12-volt
power supply, via a “switching system” consisting of bare copper
contacts that had to be maneuvered by hand. “You can't photograph
that,” Schnurer said firmly. “That's an integral part of my patent
application”

I stared at his apparatus in dismay. Even straining my creative
powers to the limit, clearly there was no way to portray this as cut¬
ting-edge science. The components looked as if they'd been salvaged
from a dumpster.

Schnurer, however, was eager to begin, lie showed me his “target
mass” (a bundle of seven glass rods), which he placed ceremoniously

on a borrowed digital scale. He noted the readout: 27 grams. Then
he picked up a small tank of liquid nitrogen - my liquid nitrogen,

1 realized, feeling a bit pissed about it - and he poured a portion
into a Dewar flask. The liquid hissed like oil in a hot frying pan as
it boiled violently at room temperature. We waited a few minutes
for the clouds of white vapor to die down.

“Now!” said Schnurer. He lowered the electromagnets, disc, and
target mass into the Dewar flask, to cool the disc so that its electri¬
cal resistance would diminish to zero. Then he placed the lump of
scrap metal on the scale, to read the difference in weight between it
and the assembly in the Dewar flask. The numbers flickered wildly,
responding to thermal currents in the liquid, air currents in the
room, vibration from a truck passing on the road a couple hundred
feet away, and a dozen other random factors. Still, a substantial
weight reduction would make these small fluctuations irrelevant.
“We’ll call the weight 20.68,” Schnurer said, scribbling the figure.

He went to his copper contacts and started manipulating them
to send pulses to the electromagnets. 1 watched the scale - and
suddenly felt as if reality was warping around me, because the
numbers began changing. According to the scale, the target mass
urns getting lighten

“Write down the peak value!” Schnurer alerted me.

The numbers were still jumping, but I averaged them as well as
I could, Schnurer grabbed his scrap of paper, did a subtraction,
divided the result by the original weight of the target mass, and got
his answer: here in this funky little workshop, the force of gravity
had just been reduced by 2 percent.

“Let me try that” I said, pointing to the copper contacts. Schnurer
stepped aside, looking somewhat reluctant; but when l did what he
had done, the results were the same.

“Maybe you should take a look over here,” Norman Mauskopf
remarked, nodding toward the superconductor where it dangled in
the liquid nitrogen. 1 realized with chagrin that I had been totally
hypnotized by the red LEDs on the scale. When I turned my atten¬
tion to the flask, I saw what I should have seen before: electricity
flowing through the submerged coils was creating heat that made
the frigid liquid boil, lust as eggs bounce around when you boil
them in a saucepan, the superconductor and its target mass were
being lifted by bubbles. We weren’t measuring gravity reduction,
here, we were conducting an experiment in myogenic cookery!

1 pointed this out to Schnurer. lie looked annoyed - then indif¬
ferent, and 1 realized that there was still no doubt in his mind,
because he was a True Reliever. He knew he was modifying gravity.
“So we'U lift it out of the liquid nitrogen ” he said. “It’ll stay cold
enough for the effect to work for 15 or 30 seconds. And you'll see,
it will still get lighter.”

WIRED MARCH 1998

070

We tried it, and sure enough the assembly lost weight. But it
bad dragged some liquid nitrogen with it from the flask, and was
steaming madly. This was now the source of weight loss, just as
damp clothes become lighter as they dry on a washing line.

“John, youi’e not measuring gravity fluctuations” I told him.
“You're measuring the effects of boiling and evaporation”

Schnurer was now visibly agitated. He wanted to run the experi¬
ment again. And again. He varied the target mass, scribbled more
numbers on odd scraps of paper - after a while there were so many
scraps, he lost track of which was which. For several hours he tried
every conceivable configuration.

While waiting patiently to see how long it might take him to admit
defeat, I noticed a page from Business Week lying on his workbench.
It was an article about gravity modification, mentioning Schnurers
work, illustrated with a photograph taken right here in this cramped
little hobby-den - although false color and a wide-angle lens made
the place look like a futuristic laboratoiy. Then I scanned the text
and realized that this writer possessed the creative powers that I so
sadly lacked. He seemed cautious and objective yet made Schnurer
sound like a fully qualified scientist, even identifying him as “dir¬
ector of physics engineering at Antioch College.”

I queried Schnurer about this. Gruffly he told me that he has
never been employed by Antioch University; his workshop just
happens to be near Antioch. With several partners, he rims a
very small company named Physics Engineering, of which he’s a
director. Only in this sense can he be termed a director of Physics
Engineering.

Around 9 p.m., we called it quits. I didn’t enjoy being a heartless
skeptic, questioning John Schnurer' s credentials and debunking
his dreams of refuting Einstein. I just w anted to go home.

For additional information:

Pete Skeggss gravity
information page:

wwwJneta rena x om/=iutilLc/pls/iraviiv.fum I

James Woodward's
mass-reduction theory:

www. np I . w »s hi nglD n .edit/ AW a I tvw83.htm I

Antigravity mailing list:

www. i n-sea rch -of . c om/

John Schnurers Gravity Society:

www.flraviiv.org/

NASA's breakthrough propulsion
physics program:

www. ta rc , n a sa .g □u/WWW/b pp/

ack in New York, three pieces of email from John Schnurer
were already waiting for me. With urgent sincerity he claimed there
had been a series of unfortunate errors. The superconductor had
become degraded! The results I’d witnessed were invalid! He begged
me to return to Ohio right away, to witness a whole new series of
experiments with a brand-new disc.

Well - thanks, but no thanks. I didn’t relish another session of
Skeptic versus True Reliever. 1 felt sure that it wouldn’t work out

any better the second time around, and it wouldn’t make either of
us very happy. Instead, I followed up another reference from the
indefatigable Pete Skeggs, and learned the strange history of NASA’s
involvement in gravity-shielding research.

In 1990 a senior scientist at the University of Alabama named
Douglas Torr started writing papers with a Chinese woman physi¬
cist named Ning li, predicting that superconductors could affect
the force of gravity. This was before Eugene Podkletnov made his
observations in Tampere, so naturally Li and Torr were delighted
when they heard that Podkletnov had accidentally validated their
predictions. Their university enjoyed a good working relationship
with the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, where they
eventually persuaded NASA to start a serious long-term investiga¬
tion. Ning Li remained involved, while Douglas Torr relocated to
South Carolina.

Skeggs now forwarded to me an amazing document suggesting
that Torr had ventured into even stranger territory. The document
was Antigravity News and Space Drive Technology', an amateur zine
that looked like a 1970s counterculture manifesto, generated on an
old daisywheel printer, pasted into pages, photocopied, and stapled
down the left edge. This science-oriented samizdat was a 190 ►

WIRED MARCH 1 9 9 S

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+ iso pain from their daughter's death.

But when Walken explained his cloning
experience at the primate center, and added
the idea of implanting the baby's DNA in
a donated egg from another woman - one
who had borne healthy children - the cou¬
ple started to come around. By the next
afternoon, they had decided to try it. “They
explained the procedure to us and said
that they needed to start work as soon as
possible to make sure our daughter's DNA
was fresh and undamaged - that she was
still, in a sense, 'alive' in her genes, but
lost without a body," says Virginia Hytner.
“Amanda and Adam made me and my
husband believe that they could give our
daughter back her body” At that point, the
Hytners were sworn to secrecy.

The team of five doctors - Koteas, Walken,
Mortensen, Stoltz, and Gomez - plus a
handful of trusted graduate student assis¬
tants, set to work culturing the child’s cells,
chemically returning them to their embry¬
onic state using samples of the advanced
demethylating drugs Walken had procured
from the primate center According to
Koteas, they also “obtained” frozen human
eggs from the gene clinic, checking them
again and again for the donor's history and
any possible disease traits.

After fusing a dormant cell nucleus with
a donor egg, the doctors jolted the egg with
electricity to see whether it would divide.
After only 10 tries, an egg started dividing
normally, and Koteas implanted it in Vir¬
ginia Hytner.

Over the next nine months occurred one
of the most closely watched pregnancies on
record. All five doctors on the cloning team
made trips from Pennsylvania to California
to monitor Virginia Hytner's progress. By
then the Hytners were already calling the
growing fetus Katy, a name they’d selected
for their first child, who they later started
to think of as Katy's lost twin. In fact, the
university team had already coined the
term serial twins to refer among themselves
to the products of the cloning process.

In late November 1999 Virginia and
Christopher Hytner took leaves of absence
from work and, accompanied by Walken,
flew to Philadelphia one more time. At
i a.m. on December 5, Katy Hytner was

delivered by Dr. Albert Gomez via cesarean
section. The team was elated, and the Hyt¬
ners were speechless, “Our daughter was
returned to us,” says Christopher Hytner.
“It was the miracle we'd prayed for”

Since their work had not been approved
by the university, the cloning team kept
all their records confidential, hidden in a
filing cabinet in Koteas's office. Still sworn
to secrecy, the team went back to its work
at the university and the Hytners returned
to California with Katy. Team members
still made regular monthly visits to Pacifica
to check on mother and child, who both
appeared healthy and safe. The reality of
the unprecedented experiment remained
protected from public scrutiny for almost
two years.

Then, last November, a chain of events
began that revealed the Hytners' secret,
Alice DeWitt, a graduate student who
had worked on the cloning team screen¬
ing donor eggs, filed for divorce from her
husband. During the stormy divorce pro¬
ceedings, Matthew DeWitt found a set of
notes - copies of papers Alice had given to
Koteas - while he was removing his wife's
belongings from their apartment. Matthew,
himself a pediatrician, recognized the
implications of the notes and offered them
through his lawyer for sale to the highest
bidder.

When news crews from the Hard Copy
cable network began scouring preschools
in Pacifica for Katy Hytner, the members
of the University of Pennsylvania cloning
team knew they had to make a public
announcement. “We could see howT things
were going ” says Koteas, “HCTV was turn¬
ing Katy's birth into a Frankenstein story,
portraying her as some frightening freak of
science. As had as things are now, we knew
that if we didn't get hold of the story, the
Hytners' lives would be ruined forever.”

Koteas's press conference was beamed
live around the world on CNN, MSNBC,
HCTV, C-Span, and all 10 major broadcast
networks. By then, the Hytner family had
left Pacifica, and if anyone on the cloning
team knows the family's whereabouts, they
aren't saying.

Aside from the media, a number of other
interested parties would like to find the Hyt¬
ner family - among them Baby Gap, Pepsi,
Benetton, and the Xerox Corporation, isi ►

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Now that human cloning has moved
from science fiction films and research
labs to the real world, what are we to
make of it? No one seems to know yet. Dr.

G. Richard Seed's operation, which moved
from Chicago to San Jose, Costa Rica, in
mid- 1999 in response to pressure from the
US government, has generated some inter¬
esting new approaches to large-scale cell
culturing and fine DNA manipulation,
but the facility has yet to bring any of its
attempted pregnancies to term. Most of
the European Union's member nations
have passed strict laws preventing human -
cloning work, though England and Ger¬
many remain holdouts. But it’s generally
known that Russia, Japan, and South Korea
are setting up their owrn experimental
cloning centers, perhaps in cooperation
with Seed's lab.

One of the few unambiguous responses
so far to Katy Hytner’s birth has come from
the Vatican, which released a statement
urging people to recognize that clones have
individual souls, even if they occupy iden¬
tical bodies. LiUle else about what some
are calling the Philadelphia Project is cer¬
tain, even whether Katy is, in fact, a legiti¬
mate clone of her dead sibling.

Since she was produced in an egg that
carried another woman's mitochondria,
some scientists, including geneticists
at MIT and Oxford University, question
whether Katy7 can be truly considered
a done of the Hytners5 first child. Perhaps
the term serial twin is about to become
common currency as Koteas and her
colleagues try to calm a nervous public
that, while admiring the motivations and
technical skill of the cloning team, isn't
sanguine about letting this genie out of
the bottle.

"No one's about to start mass-producing
copies of Adolf Hitler or rich people,"
assures Koteas. "This is one little girl -
deeply loved by her ordinary mother and
father. Trust me. There’s nothing to worry
about." ■ ■ ■

Dr Janet Barron contributed research to
I this article.

Seed

+ 1 50 cell. That's the type most susceptible to
breast cancer in humans. What if we took that
differentiated, cancerous cell and, after making
copies of it, tried maybe hundreds of different
DMA manipulations of it? Isn't it possible that we
could turn that cell back to its earliest divisions?

To the beginning of its life, before it became can¬
cerous? With the technique they worked out in
Scotland, you can set the cells back to division
zero. If we succeeded in doing that, we'd have a
cure for cancer right now. Maybe this won't work,
but you don't even think about these concepts
until you seriously start thinking about the sci¬
ence of human cloning.

"And if you didn't get all the cancer cells the
first time, you could conceivably repeat the treat¬
ment indefinitely. I can't see any side effects from
this, certainly when compared with chemotherapy.
If it worked, you could work on techniques for any
cancer you could name - and, of course, AIDS.

It's currently forbidden to use federal money to
do human-embryo research; embryos are essential
for this work. We'd like to fund it ourselves. But
this type of experiment is so dramatic that the
prohibition must be lifted for the kind of experi¬
ment I just described. It won't do any good to do
these experiments in monkeys. You have to do
them in humans. The technological and informa¬
tion benefits from human cloning will be far more
significant than the cloning of humans itself.

I'm not saying I have any instructions from God
to do this, but I am saying that it's the nature of
Protestant thinking. People are dying every day,
and they need sympathy. This is the pastor's role.
But in the Protestant era, when anyone could
read the Bible and think about it, Christians were
able to read and think for themselves, without any¬
one between them and their idea of God. When we
attain an extended life span and access to unlim¬
ited knowledge, we wilt become Godlike. And that
is God's intention. Some people think this idea is
an excessive belief. My pastor is a little bit uncom¬
fortable with my beliefs. He doesn't endorse my
position - maybe he does 5 or 1 0 percent.

With an extended life span, I'd engage in the
same human activities I've always engaged in.

I'm not unhappy with what I've done in my life,

I might be able to take on experiments that
take longer to conclude - something that I know
I won't be able to answer for 10, 20, or 30 years.
I've tried retirement. Twice. Wow, boring.

Cloning is inevitable. If I don't do it, someone else
will. There's no way you can stop science." m m m

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Legion of Doom

< isb quality level designers. To overshadow the
poor imitations, id produced its own compendium
called "The Doom Master Levels." The company
recruited four celebrity Doom heads - Kvernmo,
Anderson, Tim Willits, and Tom Mustaine.

This was the start of a Cambrian-like explosion
in the professional evolution of the level designer.
Until then, despite their professional-quality work,
they were essentially consumers. They were hum-
ble. They dreamed of doing it for a living, but no
one really believed it would happen to them.

To the contrary, all four would interview for
their dream job: a full time position at id.

The last time Kvernmo visited id Software,
he recounts, he collided head-on "with greed."
Carmack had just offered to hike his salary
considerably if he jumped ship. Concentrating on
dollar signs rather than stop signs, Kvernmo was
broadsided by a sedan on his way home. He stayed
with Ion Storm, but it wasn't an easy decision.

id is, after all, the place where it all began.
Inside the black building - in suite 666 - resides a
14-strong team including the most highly regarded
game developers in the world. Here sits John
Carmack, pale, 27, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans.

The soft, carpeted offices are quieter than they
used to be. In the game biz, the personality of

John Anderson,
aka Dr Sleep,
left a job at the
Pennsylvania
Department nf
Public Welfare
tn design
Oaikatana's
clnssical Greek
death arenas.

the dominant player In the group trickles down.
At Ion Storm, Romero's troops impersonate their
general - shouting words like "dumbass" and
"hardcore." At id, it's quiet - coder quiet, Carmack
quiet, key-tapping and hushed conversations.
The words here are "sweet spot" and "ship date."

Carmack's not surprised that so many "ama¬
teurs" are being hired. It makes good business
sense; fully trained mapmaking ninjas with years
of experience, no previous salary to barter with,
and a passion for their job. The talented people
shine like beacons.

Accordingly, all the top Doom Babies have been
courted by id. And a few years ago, they would

have blinded themselves for the chance. Says
Anderson:"lt seemed inconceivable that we
would turn them down."

But only Tim Willits took the job. In 1995 he
was at the University of Minnesota, studying com¬
puter science and business; he might have been
the little guy you used to kick around at school.

Now payback means buying a 199? Porsche
with cash and plummeting you through six floors
into a lava pit lined with nails. And then there's
his office - nice furniture, comfy chairs, and two
computers. This used to be Romero's office.

"I spent months working with Romero in here
- picked his brain," says Willits, hired in '95 to
shore up id's design team when things started
to go pear-shaped during Quake1 s development.
Strife turned to acrimony after the game was
released. Romero was fired. "He was a great guy,
but a shitty manager/' concludes Willits.

After Romero's departure, they took away the
pool table and the foosball. Deathmatching was
even banned in id's office during crunch time.
The team was too busy knuckling down on Quake IL

"After Quake II we re washing our hands of it,"
explains Carmack. "We're onto other things. Let
everyone else fight it out over content."

Those fights will feature, among other things,
Quake Ilf s considerably ramped-up gore - the fine
sprays of blood, the imploding walls of cartilage,
and the airborne body parts that actually glisten.
Vet Willits isn't worried, though they're his walls
being splattered with ichor. For him, level design¬
ing is an underappreciated art form. He's molded
frightening realism from the rawest of raw mate¬
rials - triangles and pixels. "It's all about form,
shape, and style rather than textures and walls,
about conveying feeling to the player/' He looks
suddenly serious. "We're working with incredible
technology here. And John's good. John's the
pimp. There's no one like Carmack."

Except, maybe, Romero. Two generals, two
camps, two sets of talented foot soldiers.

"There's some sniping about who's doing what
and all that, and when people start treading on
each other's release dates, then it gets a bit ugly,"
admits Carmack. "But even if Ion Storm is a spec¬
tacular success, we'll probably make more money
than anyone there makes off it, because we've
got a big chunk of the royalty."

Late at night, in the Ion Storm penthouse,
the community has gathered to watch the
Fourth of July fireworks.

Despite the rivalries, and the Romero- vers us-
Carmack thing, the Doom Babies still get along.

Even in this deranged city, they've maintained
the sense of community from the CompuServe
days. Then, they were united under a frontier
mentality, working to push the open system
to its limits. Now they get paid to compete.

Still, they share a vision borne by Doom .

And they see inspiration everywhere. Every
book, film, and real-life Dallas landmark and
eyesore is examined, mentally photocopied,
and rendered in Quake-o-vision. A conversa¬
tion between two Doom Babies goes some¬
thing like this;

"Hey, look at that balcony "

"Yeah, nice ivy texture."

"What happens when it joins the wall there?"
"Nothing. It's seamless."

"Wow."

"You're standing in the bathroom, pissing/'
says a Doom Baby appropriately called Levelord,
"You're looking at the wallpaper and you notice,
on the corner, it doesn't line up. And you think,
'Couldn't they spend the time to line that up?'

I do it in my levels/'

You can see why most of the Doom Babies
spurned id. Romero is romantic, organic. Talent
is the passport to his Game as Open System -
your only resume is your level, or your 3-D model,
or your new evisceration animation. At id, things
Carmackian are mechanical, planned, and meti¬
culous. Productivity is the key to his Game as
Machine. Sure, Carmack hits the Quake II Christ¬
mas deadline, while Romero watches Daikatana
slip until April. But working at Ion Storm isn't
a job, it's a daily visit to an amusement park.

id is unconcerned. Carmack is working on his
next engine - code-named Trinity - which will
bring even more realism to the desktop. He's
unworried by rival technology. First-class devel¬
opers like Epic MegaGames and 3D Realms are
working on next-generation front ends. Even
Microsoft, it seems, is hankering to muscle in on
the open-game posse with the DirectEngine,
which was coded by Monolith Productions.
"They're all a year behind," Carmack says, adding
with a hint of uncharacteristic sarcasm, "and like,
I'm supposed to be scared of Monolith "

Atop Ion Storm, you have to squint to see the
fireworks flare on the horizon, it seems the Com¬
merce Tower is too tall, too high in the clouds.
Disappointed, the crew departs to play a death-
match, leaving only the security guard on the
roof. Asked if he plays Quake , the guard chuckles,
"I don't need to. I've got 70 handguns and 150
rifles. I’m mad "

Crazy place, Dallas, m m m

WIRED MARCH 1998

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Hack the Magic

4 168 One thing Disney can't control is the
weather - which is not to say that it doesn't
scrutinize the skies over Orlando as carefully as
any air traffic control center. One Centra! Console
screen shows a radar image of the property, as
well as current data about wind speed, tempera¬
ture, and rainfall. Says Blackwell: "We keep an eye
on the weather in case we need to cancel outdoor
shows or shut down certain attractions like the
Skyway," a gondola that runs between Fantasy-
land andTomorrowland/The decisionmaking is
guest oriented/' he goes on /We want to keep
things operating as long as we can/'

Blackwell, who began his career at the Magic
Kingdom as a 15-year-old balloon vendor on
Main Street nearly a quarter century ago, explains
that there's a merchandising consideration, too:
the weather station allows the Central Console
to warn the dozens of shops around the park so
they can set out Mickey umbrellas and bright
yellow ponchos before the first raindrop fails.

As he talks, it becomes dear that the Disney
"cast member" structure is a case study in the
networked system. Though Blackwell's baili¬
wick is engineering, he takes pains to point out
earnestly that "shelf space is very valuable - it
wouldn't make sense to have rain gear out on
a sunny day."

Weather is similarly on the minds of a crew
of horticulturists, stationed In a nondescript
bungalow south of the Magic Kingdom, who are
responsible for keeping 3,500 acres of impossibly
lush landscaping looking that way/Landscaping
is very Important to the show," Scott Shultz, a
horticulture area manager, tells me, adding in
the same tone of earnestness that guests would
have a hard time believing they were steaming
down the Amazon without a suitable rain forest
or strolling along Hollywood Boulevard without
towering palm trees.

Shultz and two other horticulturists operate
MaxiCom, a computerized irrigation system
made by Rain Bird. Based on input from the
weather stations, MaxiCom's PC-based software
determines how much water each of the proper¬
ty's 600 zones needs. Each has up to 10 individu¬
ally watered beds; when a message comes in from
the gardeners that a row of azaleas at Disney-
MGM Studios is drying out, the horticulturist will
Increase the amount of water delivered there
each night. When a torrential rainstorm passes
over the property, the MaxiCom system adjusts
by watering less - about 50 automated rain cans

that measure by hundredths of an inch are scat¬
tered around the property and plugged Into the
network. "Every morning at 1:25, we download
the data to duster control units (CCUs) situated
around the property/ says Shultz. The CCUs man¬
age the sprinkler timers, which govern 50,000
sprinkler heads between them. Shultz's crew also
prowls the property daily in a van equipped with
a laptop and cellular modem, troubleshooting
the whole system - one of the most sophisticated
large-scale irrigation setups anywhere.

Then there's the Muzak.

Back In Engineering Central, a rack of Sony CD
players handles background music for the King¬
dom, keyed to the six different Lands, as well as
to different times of day. The music - hillbilly
banjo picking for Frontierland, for example -
travels via dedicated lines to weatherproof
speakers hidden throughout the park. But first
it's filtered through a sophisticated switcher-
router system that lets Disney's programmers
create "events" - or miniature programs - that
fade the musk in or out as necessary.

Engineering Central's Crown IQ computerized
sound system also controls overall audio volume
throughout the park/People absorb noise, and
they create noise of their own," Blackwell notes.
"As the crowds come in through Main Street and
the morning progresses, we subtly increase the
sound of the background music so it doesn't get
drowned out"

Across the room from where we're sitting is
a cramped, closet-sized space that looks like a
cross between a recording studio and a surveil¬
lance bunker - Parade Central. Inside, a colorful
map of the park fills one monitor; another has
a bird's-eye video view down Main Street from
the top of Cinderella Castle. A huge mixing board
dominates the desk, where a single technician
orchestrates the twice-daily parades that are a
Magic Kingdom staple.

Audio specialist Jim Dotson sits down and
starts an imaginary parade. "We fire the event by
phone," he says, loading the parade data into the
system from a Digital Equipment VAX mainframe.
"As the parade progresses, the audio cross-fades
from zone to zone. So you hear different music
based on where you're sitting and what float is
In front of you/

It's a major feat of synchronization, and easier
said than done. To make the musk from speakers
on the floats match the music from 175 speakers
along the parade route, the first thing the system
needs to know is the minute-to-minute location
of the floats. It gets that from "pucks" embedded

in the street that communicate with each vehicle;
each float also signals its precise location by
counting the number of wheel revolutions it
makes. Parade Central's monitors show tiny, color-
coded float icons inching through the park: red
if things are moving too fast, green for too slow,
and gray for normal. When an icon turns black,
that's a bad sign. It means a float has gotten
stuck in, say, the trolley tracks that line Main
Street. A tractor - waiting on standby, of course
- is dispatched by radio to make the rescue.

The audio track itself is separately stored on
each float, using NuOptics EPROM-embedded
chips. The route is divided into 33 separate
zones, with the playback coordinated by a DTMF
(dual-tone modulation frequency) code broad¬
cast from the top of Cinderella Castle/That
makes sure that the cross-fades are hitting at
the right time as floats move from zone to zone,"
Dotson says.

On a lot of vehicles - say, the Little Mermaid
float, which features Sebastian the crab singing,
talking, and waving his arms - the audio also has
to be synced with the character.The answer:
SMPTE time codes - the same Society of Motion
Picture of Television Engineers codes used to
match up images and sound in TV and movie
production. Here they control not just the music
and animatronks, but also, indirectly, the float
drivers and performers.

And what about, say, midparade downpours,
a regular occurrence during summer afternoons
in central Florida? "We just click an icon, and the
parade bypasses alt its production numbers and
just goes straight from point A to point B/'says
Dotson. "We try to avoid water damage to the
costumes and floats."

Even software sprinkled with pixie dust can
get buggy. Not long ago. Parade Central's moni¬
tors showed some floats speeding up and pass¬
ing others in midprocession, which definitely
was not happening on the ground/We had a
meeting to debug it," Dotson explains, "and we
figured out that in the staging area where the
floats line up, just behind Town Hall on Main
Street, some of the drivers would park their
floats out of order.Then, when the parade was
ready to start, they'd move around and get into
position. All the while, the VAX was reading the
wheel rotations, and the extra revs meant the
second float was way ahead of the first. We had
to scour the logs to figure out what was going
on and take care of it/

As he's talking, Smith's and Black well's beepers
go off. {The pagers are, of course, emblazoned

WIRED MARCH } 99 8

D&S

with Mickey Mouse icons; both the paging and
telephone system are run by Disney's own Vista-
United Telecommunications.) Smith looks down
at the alphanumeric display. "Curtain's broken
at Bear Band" - shorthand for Frontierland's
Country Bear Jamboree. The notice is just a for¬
mality - technicians from Attractions West (one
of several administrative zones in the Magic
Kingdom) have already been dispatched to the
scene. During the day, two dozen maintenance
people make sure all the shows stay 102 (online).
At night, when the bulk of maintenance and
upkeep is done, the staffing jumps to 85.

Blackwell and I head out through the broken
biometric door and down the Utilidor toward
Tomorrowland/The day shift and second shift
are focused on keeping the attractions running
and the guests safe/' he says/'At night, we
address show quality and do inspections and
adjust the animation. So, during the day, in
spurts, it's fast and furious - responding to emer¬
gencies. At night, it's routine maintenance." The
PA in the tunnel is playing Bachman-Turner
Overdrive's "Takin' Care of Business"; no "Whistle
While You Work" for this crew.

he story line of Alien Encounter, which
debuted as part of a revamped Tomor-
rowland in 1995, is one of Disney's old
standards: technology gone awry, The
conceit is that a new teleportation device, devel¬
oped by the Orwellian XSTeth Corporation, is
being demo'd for the audience. In the preshow
area, it accidentally sizzles over a lovable, fuzzy
alien. Inside the auditorium, it misfires again,
beaming down a drooling carnivore (audto-
animatronic, actually) instead of the glad-handing
CEO of XS Tech. The teleportation device fails
once more before the show is over; it can't con¬
tain the hungry alien, who breaks out and begins
feasting on the assembled crowd.

in the service area below, the story is dramati¬
cally different: here, the technology is safe, con¬
trolled, and utterly predictable. For starters, there
are several banks of 1,800-watt-per-channel
servo-driven subwoofers that produce a low-
frequency audio rumble. There are also trans¬
ducers on the seats, which periodically cause
everything upstairs that's not bolted down to
vibrate in sympathy with the faux alien. Jimmy
Sizemore and Mike Jones, the technicians who
keep tabs on the show, seem to tune it out.
They've got bulky ear protectors handy - the
kind airport ground crews wear - In case they
have to enter the subwoofer dungeon when a

show's in progress. They won't let me into the
room when the monster woofers are in action.
But the din - even through a set of heavy metal
doors - sounds like an AC/DC concert without
the treble.

Despite the noise, it would be hard, based on
what goes on down here, to imagine what kind
of pulse-pounding theatrical experience is going
on upstairs. Sizemore and Jones spend their shift
taking care of the gear, making sure the attrac¬

tion stays 102. A lanky Tennessean who used to
work in construction, Sizemore says simply, “Noth-
ing can really prepare you for this kind of job."

It includes keeping an eye on the 8-foot- long
Coherent Innova laser outfit that creates many of
the futuristic lighting effects of Alien Encounter.
The rig requires regular recalibration, since the
minor earthquake created by the transducers
continually throws it out of alignment. Other
routine tasks include checking for leaks in the
hydraulic pumps and pipelines that supply fluid
to the show's animatronic figures and lifts.
There's also a lighting system fit for Pink Floyd,
run by Omega Show Controllers, that sends
rapid-fire cues to a set of Intellibeam control¬
lers that operate programmable spotlights.

And finally, there's baby-sitting enough com¬
puters to run a major online service, support a
good-sized television network, manage a multi¬
national bank, or, well, put on a 21 -minute show
for a herd of tourists.

The 7 -foot racks of computer gear include a
melange of expensive silicon that Disney's
design arm, Imagineering, creates with the help
of MAPO, its manufacturing group. (The latter's
name is a play on "Mary Poppins/' intended to
evoke the whimsy that Disney's technology
strives to generate.)

Blackwell, Long, and the others are squirreily
when it comes to distinguishing between what
Disney makes and what comes from outside
vendors. But it's dear from the brand names on
some of the equipment that, as Eric Jacobson,
senior vice president of creative development at
Imagineering, puts it, the company doesn't feel
the need to "constantly reinvent the wheel."
Disney's audio-animatronic figures set the stan¬
dard for the industry (which includes rivals like

DaS

Universal Studios), But the engineering ethos
isn't about the coolest, newest technologies;
indeed, older shows I ike The American Adventure
still run on mag tape, a decades-old platform.
This is showbiz, not science; reliability counts
for a lot. And the company keeps a close eye on
costs, normally replacing major systems only
when an entire attraction is dosing down any¬
way for rehab.

Alien Encounter, which replaced Mission to

Mars, is part of the new generation. It's built
around what Disney calls a show-supervisor
unit - an SSU, to the people who run it - a rack¬
mounted system that coordinates lighting,
smoke effects, audio, and video screens. The
machine also manages three SI Us - show-
interface units - one that controls the brief
preshow and one for each of the two side-by-
side sit-down theaters. There are EPROMs to
store digital audio, as well as MAPO-designed
MFSCs (multifeedback servo cards), each of
which can control up to eight functions on an
animatronic figure.The whole performance is
synchronized using SMPTE generators from
Gray Engineering Labs; programmable logic
controllers monitor various functions for failure.
Backstage, Disney prefers that its technology
not go awry.

M isney may be classified by stock ana-
lysts as an entertainment company,
■9 but it has been hovering around tech¬
nology from the start, 70 years ago: sound mar¬
ried to animation in Sfeomfrotff Willie , new
camera setups invented for Fantasia, the most
sophisticated robot built to date (a faux Abe
Lincoln) for the 1964 New York World's Fair.

That said, Disney is decidedly not into releas¬
ing bug-ridden beta versions, a policy that
becomes dear on a visit to Test Track, the General
Motors-sponsored Epcot thrill ride that was sup¬
posed to open to the public in the spring of last
year, it's now expected to open in time for this
summer's crowds.

Development on this ride is exhaustive and
expensive. That's classic Walt. According to Bob
Thomas's 1976 biography, Wait Disney: An Ameri¬
can Original, Disney told one of the original ibb ►

WIRED MARCH 1990

There are enough Computers to run an online
service, manage a multinational bank, or put on a
21-minute show for a herd Of tourists.

Hack the Magic

+ 187 Imagmeers/'You and I don't worry about
whether anything is cheap or expensive. We only
worry if it's good, ! have a theory that if it's good
enough, the public will pay you back for it. fve
got a big building full of all kinds of guys who
worry about costs and money. You and I just
worry about doing a good show."

The Test Track concept is a bit daunting: guests
serve as crash-test dummies in a high-speed
reenactment of automobile safety and perfor-

What the "guests" get ■

mance tests. No one will talk about why the
debut is so far behind schedule, but rumors vari¬
ously have it that the tires are wearing out too
quickly, the track needs more control zones, or
the Imagineers keep adding new flourishes.
Getting a show like Test Track ready involves
running various components nonstop until
glitches emerge. On the upper level of the ride,
there's a set of sliding doors that open and close

so fast - zip, snap, like a camera shutter - that it
takes us a few cycles to realize that outside the
doors, it's pouring rain. During this part of the
ride, the vehicle will appear to be performing a
collision test with the wall, speeding up and then
- seemingly - bashing right into a barrier. In
reality the vehicle will slip through the door so
quickly, accompanied by dramatic audio and
visual effects, that riders will think they actually
busted through the wall.

A technician is sitting in a folding chair near
the doors, reading a copy of USA Today and wait¬

ing to see whether anything breaks. Every 10.5
seconds the doors open - zip, snap. Says project
engineer Jerold Kaplan/'You can't just walkout
to Joe's Fast-Operating Door Warehouse and find
doors that open in half a second - at least that
we know of. So we built this ourselves, and that
means that we need to test it for reliability our-
selves.'The doors seem to be working fine so far.

Once Kaplan and his crew are convinced that

the ride is problem-free and ready to run, they'll
summon groups of cast members from around
the property to be guinea pigs.Then they'll do a
"soft" opening, allowing guests to ride for a few
hours a day. That gives engineers a chance to
make any final adjustments - and attendants to
become proficient at loading the vehicles with
their human cargo,

t's hard to imagine a more problem-
free piece of the planet than Walt
Disney World. A massive fleet of mono
rails, buses, ferry boats, and trams transport
150,000 people to and from the three major
parks on a busy day. Each entrant is sold a mag¬
netically coded piece of paper {to register with a
networked turnstile), then fed, entertained, cor¬
ralled, bombarded with experiences, and sold
merchandise (the average daily spending per
visitor is $52). When Disney asks its guests about
the quality of their experience, fewer than 2 per¬
cent rate it "below average/'

What guests get, and by all accounts are sub-
liminally attracted to, is an environment where
nothing is left to chance.The fact that Disney
exercises just as much control over its guests as
its hardware is turned to advantage - not least

and, by all accounts,
are subliminally attracted to - is an environment

where nothing is left to chance.

Intense.

UNCOMPROMISING.
FULL OF CHARACTER.

IT DESCRIBES OUR WINES
AS MUCH AS IT DOES
THE PEOPLE
WHO MAKE THEM.

It takes passion, as well as talent and dedication, to create wines of elegance and

because this coercion is as invisible as the com¬
puter terminals themselves. In all three Florida
parks, for example, there's a camera shop on the
right as you enter in the morning ("Hey, we need
to get some film!") and souvenir shops on the
right as you exit at the end of the day ("Hey, let's
get a Pluto T-shirt for the dog-sitterl'TThe place¬
ment of these shops is decidedly not arbitrary;
park designers operate on the principle that
most people are right-handed and thus favor
that side as they walk. The most popular rides,
meanwhile, are located at the park perimeters
for the same reason that supermarkets stock milk
in the back of the store: people will buy food and
souvenirs along the way, as well as try other
rides, further filling Disney's coffers and spread¬
ing out the crowds.

But Disney planners are wary of making things
too efficient. The right amount of waiting in line
helps build anticipation, whether for a spin with
Dumbo the Flying Elephant or a 13-story near-
freefall drop in the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror
And if guests could flit easily from ride to ride,
they'd be done with a park around lunchtime.
The longer they stay, the more they spend (an
estimated $5 billion overall in 1997).The most
valuable visitors are those who stay in one of the

parks1 26 Disney-owned hotels. The company lets
them into the parks an hour early.lt also sched¬
ules parades for midafternoon, when people
might be tempted to head back to their hotel
for a swim or a nap. And it seduces tired families
into lingering past dark with spectacular fire¬
works displays.

The fireworks show at Epcot uses 26 comput¬
ers that control music, strobes, lasers, fountains,
and the ignition of 750 aerial shells, candles,
comets, and mines. Like parades at the Magic
Kingdom, everything is synchronized using the
SMPTE time code, ensuring that the CD players
in a room beneath Future World sync up with
the independent lighting computers at each of
World Showcase's 1 1 pavilions, not to mention
the four launching barges that float in the
lagoon.

"We call it a kiss goodnight," says fireworks
production manager Bernie Durgin,

Atop the Mexico pavilion, a team of techni¬
cians monitors the show, keeping an eye on the
weather radar. If the winds in the area exceed
20 miles per hour, they'll load a different version
of the show into the computers - one that elimi¬
nates some of the high-flying shells. They're also
on the lookout for low-flying aircraft, in which

case they turn some of the lasers off. As with the
rest of Disney's attractions, cast members like
Durgin do frequent show-quality reviews to
make sure the pyrotechnics are up to par.

Disney is also doing some pushing on the
pyrotechnic front - Durgin's group is looking into
building microprocessors into the shells to con¬
trol their detonation postlaunch, with just a 10-
millisecond margin of error. "If you were able to
synchronize the music and the pyrotechnics, you
could create some interesting effects," he says
excitedly. But then, lest I get the wrong idea, he
hastens to add that this is not technology for
technology's sake. "The idea is to be able to cre¬
ate and evoke feelings and emotions within an
audience," he assures me.

The funny thing is, I actually believe him, even
after I've ventured into the illusionists' private
quarters and have their trade secrets revealed
Something strange is going on at Walt Disney
World: technology has transcended the actuators
and SSUs and muttifeedback servo cards.The
hardware and software have dissolved into the
background, like the Cheshire cat. What remains
is a virtual world - illusions on top of technology.
And as advanced as the gadgetry gets, it's still
the magic that draws us in.n ■ ■

www. aboutwi nes . cam or I -S00-7 2 6-6 136

©■ 19^$ Sterling Vineyards, Calisfcoga, CA. Those who appreciate quality enjoy it responsibly.

STERLING

complexity. No wonder the people at Sterling make wines of such character.

Gravity

^177 hopeless muddle of wacky ideas and
grandiose claims, but on its back cover it
reproduced an announcement from the
Office of Technology Transfer at the Univer¬
sity of South Carolina,

Incredibly, this text described a “gravity
generator” that would create & force beam
in any desired direction. The announcement
concluded: “University seeks licensee and/or
joint development* USC ID number: 96140 P
At the bottom of tbe page was a phone num¬
ber for William F. Littlejohn at the Office
of Technology Transfer, so I called it, and
reached an assistant named Frances Jones*
Sounding not very happy, she confirmed
that the announcement was genuine. “But
Mr. Littlejohn says it was presented pre¬
maturely, it got wider distribution than we
intended, and we’re - still working on the
technology, and would prefer not to receive
any publicity”

1990), and he even managed to get a US
patent For his device (number 5,280,864,
issued January 25, 1994).

I called him at his office at Cal State
Fullerton, where he’s heen affiliated for 25
years and is currently an adjunct professor
of physics* He lurned out to be a jovial, ami¬
able man who was more than willing to talk
on the record, probably because his work
has remained so obscure, no one lias had a
chance to ridicule it yet

The equipment he uses is relatively sim¬
ple, which is just as well, since he’s had to
pay for a lot of it himself. If you want to
reduce the mass of an object in the privacy
of your own basement workshop, here’s how
it’s done: Obtain a high tech ceramic capaci¬
tor (a standard electronic item) and attach it
to the speaker terminals on a stereo amplifier.
Feed in a steady tone (perhaps from one of
those stereo-test CDs) while using some
kind of electromechanical apparatus (maybe
the guts from an old loudspeaker) lo vibrate

Practical applications oi mass reduction

could be within five years, says James Woodward - “if someone decided

to put in substantial

amounts of money."

She refused lo say if Douglas Torr was
involved, but on the university’s Web site 1
found an Annual Report to tbe Faculty Sen¬
ate which listed his name on a patent appli¬
cation for the gravity generator. This was
totally bizarre; a respected university sup¬
posedly looking for commercial partners lo
develop a gadget straight out of a 1950s sci¬
ence-fiction novel* Surely, nothing could be
weirder than this - but no, there was more
in store. Through my physicist friend John
Cramer 1 learned of a scientist named James
Woodward who claimed to have found a
way to reduce the mass of objects*

“Mass” doesn’t mean the same thing as
“weight” You’d weigh less on the moon than
on the Earth, because weight depends oil the
force of gravity. Mass, on the other hand, is
an innate property of matter; it exists even
when an object is in free fall* Nevertheless,
Woodward had written a paper claiming
that he could adjust the mass of an object
(Foundations of Physics Letter's, vol* 3, no* 5,

the capacitor up and down. According to
Woodward, the capacitor’s mass will vary at
twice the frequency of the signal, so you will
need a circuit called a frequency doubler to
drive your vibrator at the correct rate. If the
vibrator lifts the capacitor while it’s momen¬
tarily lighter and drops it while it’s heavier,
you achieve an average mass reduction -
which sounds as if you’re getting something
for nothing, except that Woodward believes
that in some mysterious fashion you are
actually stealing the energy from the rest
of the universe.

1 asked him why no one had ever noticed
that the weight of capacitors varies in rhythm
with their energy level* “Well ” he said,
“people don’t normally go around weighing
capacitors ”

He claimed that so far he’s measured a
reduction of up to 150 milligrams; just a frac¬
tion of an ounce* Still, practical applications
could be developed, “If someone decided to
put substantial amounts of money into this,

you could have something within three to five
years* For spacecraft, all you’d need would
be big solar arrays instead of rocket fuel,”

1 asked him if there was any chance that his
discovery might turn out lo be bogus, like cold
fusion. “Of course!” he said, laughing cheer¬
fully* “l have biweekly paranoia attacks, and
then I try something else to see if 1 can make
this effect go away. But, it won’t go away”

I asked his opinion of the team at NASA.
“Serious and competent, sensible folks "
he said - though he seemed to find gravity
shielding a bit implausible, even compared
with mass reduction.

Clearly, it was time to call NASA, 1 con¬
tacted David Noever, a theoretical physicist
and former Rhodes scholar who started
working with NASA in 1987 after getting
a PhD at Oxford University, England* He
seemed to be the key figure trying to repli¬
cate Podkletnov’s work, and he invited me
lo see for myself.

Marshall Spaceflight Center is a box-
shaped 10 -story office building with a 1960s
pedigree. The closer I came, the shabbier it
looked; when 1 walked up the front steps,

I noticed cracks between the faded gray pan¬
els of its facade. Alas, poor NASA! Formerly
the favorite child of federal legislators, now
nickd-and-dinied half lo death. Upslairs
I found utilitarian government- style offices
with cheesy rubberized floor tiles, ancient
gray steel desks, and file cabinets that seemed
Lo have been repainted by hand. The place
was almost Soviet in its austerity,

I entered the office of Whitt Brantley, chief
of the Advanced Concepts Office, and found
five people waiting around a wood -grain
formica conference table. David Noever was
one of them: a tall, brooding figure with
intense eyes and dark brown hair in need
of a trim. Behind a desk at the far end sat
Brantley, a genial Santa Claus who joined
NASA hack in 1963, when he worked on
von Braun’s wildly ambitious scheme to
put men on Mars, before the Apollo pro¬
gram had even test- launched its first cap¬
sule. Even this seemed relatively normal,
though, compared with gravity shielding.

I asked him how he had raised the money
for such a wacky idea. 192 ►

WIRED MARCH 1998

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Gravity

^ i*o “The first research proposal l wrote
didn’t have the word ‘gravity1 in it anywhere”
he said with a grin. “Then the Sunday
Telegraph article came out, and our admin¬
istrator, Goldin, was going to a Star Trek
convention where the Trekkies might ask him
about gravity modification, so we decided to
tell him what was going on. He backed up
a step or two, then said he thought NASA
should spend a little money on work like this.
So, we wiped the sweat ofT our brows and
continued”

Tony Robertson, another member of the
team, leaned forward, a lot younger and
more earnest that Brantley, “The way I see
it” he said, “NASA has a responsibility to
overcome gravity.”

“Right" said Brantley. “We’ve been build¬
ing antigravity machines since day one - it’s
just that they’re not as efficient as we'd like
them to be.”

Everyone chuckled at that.

“It’s true we’re pushing the edge” Brantley
went on. “But the only way to guarantee you
don’t win the lottery is, don’t buy a ticket ”

l turned to David Noever, who looked tense
and restless, as if he’d rather be in his labo¬
ratory. I asked how he felt about amateur
gravity enthusiasts. “Well, we went to visit
.John Schnurer” he said. “But he wouldn’t
let us in. We had to meet him outside on a
park bench. We also invited PodMetnov to
come to Huntsville, back in January 1997. We
said we’d pay his way, but he said he didn’t
see any value in it."

“It’s not uncommon for people to distrust
NASA ” said Brantley, “because we’re part of
the government. They think even if we did
discover something, we’d cover it up. You
know, Roswell and all that -w

By this time. Noever was definitely ready
to go. “Let’s show you the lab he said.

He led the way outside to an enclave of
austere, ugly concrete buildings that looked
as if they might have been left over from
World War IT. Inside, past massive machinery
for pressing ceramic discs, I entered a lab
about 20 feet square, with one wall of win¬
dows, fluorescent ceiling panels, big white
cylinders of liquid helium and liquid nitro¬
gen, and heavy-duty rack- mounted power
supplies in rectangular metal cabinets.

Noever exp lamed that the team is Hying

several different approaches. He showed an
assortment of 1-inch superconducting discs,
made from every conceivable mix of ingre¬
dients. He demonstrated a gravimeter: a
beige-painted metal unit the size of a car
battery. Across the room was a tall insulated
tank about a foot in diameter, with a huge
coil w rapped around Lhe base capable of tak¬
ing 800 amps, though Noever said that the
current would create enough heat to melt
the floor. The tank had been designed to con¬
tain a 6-inch disc rotating in liquid helium,
with the gravimeter suspended above.

Meanwhile, the team was still struggling
to fabricate 12-inch discs, which tend to
fracture into pieces during pressing and a
subsequent baking process. “This is what
Podkletnov says is the heart of the matter”
said Noever, “learning to make the discs.

He said it could take us one or two years.

He did reveal the composition

But not the step-by-step method for pro¬
duction?

Noever laughed sourly. “Of course not.

At least, he hasn’t told ns. He’s very adamant
about not talking to people about some
aspects of this work.”

Already, though, Noever said he had
achieved some possible results with smaller
discs. He showed one graph that suggested
significant changes in gravitational force. “We
only saw this a couple of times. We have to
see it 100 times before we’ll allow ourselves
to reach any conclusions. And then we’ll get
the Bureau of Standards in here to check it
out, and then, maybe, we’ll publish a paper.”

Noever suggested that gravity may have
a natural frequency, far higher than X rays
or microwaves, which would explain why it
penetrates all known materials. A supercon¬
ducting disc could resonate and downshift
the frequency to a Lower level where it could
be blocked by normal matter. “But this is all
very speculative,” he cautioned, adding that it’s
just one of three theories that could explain
gravity shielding,

Ron Koczor, project manager of the team,
had been sitting over at one side of the lab
looking amiable but diffident. Koczor’s back¬
ground is in infrared and visible optics; his
last project was a space shuttle experiment
to measure winds in Earth’s atmosphere
using specially designed lasers. By compari¬
son, gravity shielding research is a labyrinth
of uncertainties.

“In Lhis kind of research you go from
depression to elation, sometimes just from
hour to hour,” said Koczor. “But if this is
real, it’s going to change civilization. The
payoff boggles the mind. Theories about
gravitational force today are probably com¬
parable to knowledge of electromagnetism
a century ago. If you think what electricity
has done for us since then, you see what
controlling gravity might do for us in the
future”

l_

yet another message to Giovanni Modanese,
asking again if Eugene Podkletnov was will¬
ing to talk to me. Naturally I didn’t expect
a positive reply - but to my amazement
Modanese wrote back saying Lhat Podkletnov
had returned to Finland and was now ready
to cooperate.

I called Podkletnov right away. Yes, he said,
it was true; he would talk. I could meet him
in person.

Four days later I wras boarding a Fiimair
MD-tl. Nine hours after that I found myself
in Helsinki Airport, waiting for my baggage
to come off a carousel. About 200 Finns were
waiting with me, looking stoic and withdrawn,
like guests at a funeral. The only sound
was the clanking of the conveyor belt, and
I remembered a phrase from the Lonely
Planet travel guide that Fd read on the plane:
“A happy, talkative Finn does not inspire
admiration among fellow Finns, but rather
animosity, jealousy, or hostility. Being silent
is the way to go."

Outside, it was almost noon but looked
like dusk. “Winter is the most hopeless
time, when many people are depressed ”
my guidebook warned me. In fact, back in
the early 1970s a Finnish scientist named
Erkki Vaisanen discovered SAD - seasonal
affective disorder, the type of depression
caused by lack of sunlight. He was tipped
off by the rash of suicides that sweeps
through Finland every September. 1 began
to wonder why Podkletnov had chosen to
relocate here.

I drove to a grim little industrial park
(where all the buildings were painted gray,
as if to emulate the weather) and checked
in at a Holiday Inn that looked like a i*4 ►

WIRED MARCH 1998

D9Q

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Gravity

+ 192 small electronics factory. After exiting
an elevator paneled in stainless steel,

I struggled to open a massive metal fire
door, walked past a sauna, and unlocked my
tiny Euro-style room. Shortly before sunset,
around 4:30 in the afternoon, l did some
serious channel surfing in a dutiful attempt
to locate and comprehend the core, the quin¬
tessence of Finland,

The first thing I found was an ancient
episode of hey-hey-we're-the-Monkees resus¬
citated from some godforsaken video archive
and dubbed in French, “ puree que nous
rnonkee around,75 Then there was a 1990
Hong Kong action movie, dubbed in German,
subtitled in Finnish - maybe Swedish, it was
hard to tell,

Finland's identity was proving elusive,
and I could think of at least one reason why,
A key factor could be the 1,300 -kilometer
frontier that the country shares with Russia.

How did the Finns cope with the ominous
presence of that notoriously expansionist
superpower during the fearful decades of
the Cold War? They suppressed then1 sepa¬
rate national identity. They made their polit¬
ical system close enough to communism
to placate the Politburo, and they traded
actively, selling the Russians cheap wood
products and electronic devices such as
telephones. Thus, they made themselves far
too useful to be worth invading.

Interestingly, the policy of appeasement
paid dividends, Finland enjoys steady
growth, with inflation down near 1 percent.
It exports telecommunications products to
the rest of Europe and steals shipbuilding
contracts from the Japanese. Its infrastruc¬
ture looks well maintained. Its people seem
healthy. Thus, Eugene Podkletnov’s pres¬
ence here is not such a mystery after all.
Compared with Russia, Finland is a land
of opportunity.

A

I Mud so, finally: Tampere.

As l drive in on Highway 3, the first thing
I see is a huge smokestack and a rail yard
with mercury-vapor lights on steel towers.
Another smokestack stands in the distance,
trailing a white plume. Although the popu¬
lation is under 200,000, this is still the sec¬
ond-largest city in Finland, and a haven for
industry.

Opposite the railroad I find the Hotel
Arctia, where Podkletnov has agreed to
meet, since he feels that his “modest apart¬
ment building35 is not suitable.

In a slightly rundown lobby paneled in
varnished plywood, I sit on a couch uphol¬
stered In drab gray wrinkled fabric and wait
as patiently as I can, very conscious that
I have come 5,000 miles on this far-fetched,
far-flung pilgrimage - at which point a man
in a navy blue pinstriped business suit walks
into the lobby.

This is Eugene Podkletnov,

He looks strangely similar to NASA scien¬
tist David Noever, with sharp features and
a restless intensity. Close up, though, his
face shows a poignant mix of emotions. His
mouth twists quixotically a! the corners,
as if, at any moment, he may display some
unexpected response - pathos, laughter, or
resignation.

He sits beside me on the rumpled gray
couch, and I ask why he decided to talk to
me after al most a year of evasion, “You
seem sincere,55 he says, choosing his words
cautiously, “and you are polite, and He
smiles faintly. “Yon are very persistent.”

But lie's not interested in small talk. He
pulls out a wad of papers and starts a long
monolog.

First, he tells me, his work has been repli¬
cated by students in Sheffield, England, and
scientists in Toronto, Canada. No, he wron5t
give me their names. He consulted by phone

with the Sheffield students, and he went in
person to Canada, where he stayed for sev¬
eral weeks. “If people follow my experiments
exactly” he says, “they succeed. But if they
want to follow their own way He shrugs.
“1 try to cheer them up, let them do it, they
may find things that I missed” He sounds
skeptical - sarcastic, even - and ! think heJs
referring to the NASA team. 1 wonder if
there's a trace of Russian jealousy, here; a
suspicion that well-funded Americans will
stamp “NASA” on the side of the first fully
functional grav-modtfying flying machine,
at which point everyone wil I forget about
Eugene Podkletnov.

He claims, though, he's happy to share
the glory. “What we should do is combine
our efforts and organize the Institute for
Gravity Research, My aim in life is not to
get money, not to become famous. I have
30 publications in materials science, and
10 patents, but His mouth twists with
bittersweet humor. “Russian people are
never rich unless they are criminals. I don't
dream about big money. I just want a nor¬
mal existence, working for the Institute for
Gravity Research. That is my dream.”

He speaks rapidly and shows no hesitation,
not the slightest sign of doubt, 1 gel him to
stop and back up a little, to tell me about
his history.

He says that his father was a materials
scientist, while his mother had a PhD in
medicine - just as he, now, is a materials
scientist with a wife who is studying medi¬
cine. “My father was born in 1896, he spoke
six languages freely, he became a professor
at Saint Petersburg, we had the atmosphere
of scientific research a l home all the time.

I was brought up surrounded by adults,
spent veiy little time playing with friends
in school, and even now I feel dif ferent from
colleagues my own age. My father had sev¬
eral inventions in his life, but at that time
the Russians asked him like this: 'Does this
method exist in the United States?7 My father
answered no, so they said, 'Then this must
be entire nonsense? 55 Again Podkletnov gives
me an ambiguous smile, tainted with bitter¬
ness. “Finally when he got a patent in the
United States and Japan, then they gave him
a patent in Russia”

Eugene graduated with a master's degree
from the University of Chemical Technology,
Mendeleyev Institute, in Moscow; then mm*

Gravity may have a fl3tUml f rGljUGVtCy.
says NASA’s David Noever, far higher than X rays or microwaves -

which would explain why it penetrates all known materials.

WIRED MARCH 1998

D9Q

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Gravity

m 194 spent 15 years at the Institute for High
Temperatures in the Russian Academy of
Sciences. In 1988 Tampere University's Insti¬
tute of Technology invited him to pursue a
PhD in the manufacture of superconductors,
and after he obtained his doctorate, he con¬
tinued working there - until the Sunday
Telegraph news item appeared in 1996.
Suddenly he was abandoned by his friends,
unemployed, and fighting the scientific
establishment much as his father had fought
with the Russian government, except that
in his case the stakes were higher, because
he believed he had made one of the major
discoveries of the 20th century.

Feeling beaten down and alienated,
Podkletnov says he gave up in 1997 and
drove the 1,400 kilometers hack to Mos¬
cow, Leaving his family in Tampere. Rut
Moscow was not a good place for a scien¬
tist to be. In the 1980s he had been able
to borrow equipment freely from other sci¬
entists; in 1997, when he asked for some¬
thing they would say, “How much can
you pay me?”

“Russians claim they are happy now
because they have freedom,” Podkletnov
tells me, “but they are not happy, and they
are not free. If you criticize the govern¬
ment, you may still go to jail. If you call an
ambulance, it does not come. If you call the
police, they do not come. Even criminals
complain that they were better off under
communism. College professors are trying
to live on $200 a month in a city where
prices are almost as high as in New York,
and salary payments are delayed by six
months. So - 1 returned here. I have a job,
now, in a local company, as a materials sci¬
entist. It only uses perhaps 5 percent of my
abilities, but He shrugs.

He insists that he isn't embittered. “It is
good for a person to be unsatisfied in some
way” he says. “You should be happy in fam¬
ily life but not satisfied in your surround¬
ings. This is a source of progress. We have
a proverb ill Russia: The harder they beat
us, the stronger we become ” He gives me
his twisted smile. “The only problem is,
maybe they beat me so much, I never have
a chance to use the strength ”

I ask how people at his laboratory would
characterize him.

“They say always that I am too serious.

You understand, here today, I am trying to
speak with humor to make your job easier.
But in general I am a very determined per¬
son, very precise in everything. I don't smile
when I am working. When I work, I work”

I ask him what happened to his equip¬
ment at Tampere University.

“Part of it is still there, but they don't work
with superconductors any longer, and I am
not allowed to come to the institute. But still,
I can show you the outside of the building.”

We walk out into the dark gray afternoon.
“Now you are going to be a veiy brave per¬
son,” says Podkletnov, “to ride in a Russian
car.” He unlocks a maroon Lada, which looks
like a cheap version of an old Volvo. With
another key he removes a metal clamp link¬
ing the clutch and brake pedals - a low tech
security device.

But Pve been told that Finland has a low
crime rate. “Yes,” Podkletnov agrees, “this is
true. Still, there may be Russian immigrants
around ”

1 can't tell if he's serious or joking.

The car's seat backs are almost vertical,
enforcing a rigid military posture. We drive
out to the university campus, which is un¬
compromisingly modern - and of course,
the buildings are all in shades of gray.

Back in the hotel lobby Podkletnov shows
me detailed diagrams of the experimental
equipment that he used. “We measured the
weight in every way,” he says, adamantly
denying that air currents or magnetism could
have caused spurious readings. “We used
metal shielding, we used nonmagnetic targets,
we enclosed the target in a vacuum - we
were very thorough ”

He claims that he placed a mercury
manometer (similar to a barometer) over
the sup eFcon ducting disc and recorded a
4-nun reduction in air pressure, because the
air itself had been reduced in weight. Then
he took the manometer upstairs to the lab
above his and found exactly the same result

- as if his equipment were generating an
invisible column of low gravity extending
upward indefinitely iuto space, exactly as
H. G. Wells described it almost a century ago.

At NASA, David Noever feels that gravity
reduction should diminish with distance.
Podkletnov, though, has proved to his own
satisfaction that the effect has no limit; and
if he's right, a 2 percent weight reduction
in all the air above a vehicle equipped with
gravity shielding could enable it to levitate,
buoyed up by the heavier air below. “Pm
practically sure,” Podkletnov says, “that
within 10 years, this will be done.” He gives
me a meaningful look. “If not by NASA, then
by Russia ”

But wait; there’s more. He has news that
hasn't been reported elsewhere. Despite
the hardships in Moscow, during the past
year he says he conducted research at an
unnamed “chemical scientific research
center” where he built a device that reflects
gravity. Supposedly it's based around a
Van de Graaff generator - a high-voltage

machine dating back to the earliest days of
electrical research. “Normally there are two
spheres,” he explains, “and a spark jumps
between them. Now imagine the spheres
are flat surfaces, superconductors, one of
them a coil or O-ring. Under specific condi¬
tions, applying resonating fields and com¬
posite superconducting coatings, we can
organize the energy discharge in such a way
that it goes through the center of the elec¬
trode, accompanied by gravitation phenom¬
ena - reflecting gravitational waves that
spread through the walls and hit objects on
the floors below, knocking them over”

And this, too, can have practical applica¬
tions?

“The second generation of flying machines
will reflect gravity waves and will be small,
light, and fast, like UFOs. 1 have achieved
impulse reflection; now the task is to make
it work continuously.”

He sounds completely sober, serious, 202 ►

Tying machines will reflect gravity waves -

says Podkletnov. “i have achieved

like UFOs -
impulse reflection;

now the task is to make it work continuously."

WIRED MARCH 1998

090

WIRED

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WIRED MARCH 1998

Gravity

^196 matter-of-fact

If he really wants knowledge to he freely
shar ed, why hasn't he written more about
this? And why hasn’t he been more open
with the people at NASA?

“I'm a serious person. If someone wants
serious work, I can provide this. If I was to
relocate in the United States, I would need
five or six people and two years in a univer¬
sity or well-equipped technical laboratory.

I guarantee, if I am invited, I can reproduce
everything. But 1 am not selling my experi¬
ment piece by piece. If your readers are
serious, they will be able to find me”

So here's a unique opportunity for the
venture capitalists out there. Track down
the elusive Eugene Podkletnov, make him
an offer he can't refuse, and help to free
humanity from its pedestrian existence at
the bottom of a gravity well.

Does Podkletnov really believe that this
will come to pass? lie seems to. Does he see

himself playing a central role? “I am not a
very religious person” he tells me. “But I do
believe in God. and of course there is a soul,
you can feel it.” He pauses, trying to convey
his convictions. “Most of all,” he says, “like
afl Russians, 1 have a sense of destiny. This
is a secret of the Russian soul that can’t be
explained to foreigners. Even Russian peo-
pie can't understand it. But - we feel it ,”

At the end of our meeting he strides out
of the hotel lobby, as brisk and purposeful
as an ambitious businessman, looking
younger than his 43 years. I’m impressed
by his intense focus, his strict attention to
facts and details, and his sincerity. 1 wonder,
though, if a vague sense of destiny is really
enough to get him where he wants to go.
The history of science is littered with casu¬
alties who ventured too far from the main¬
stream, or seemed a bit - wacky, for their
time. Nikola Tesla is a classic example. Even
Robert Goddard, the legendary rocketry
pioneer, was scorned and forced to work in

isolation and poverty for most of his life.

As one physicist told me, “New ideas are
always criticized - not because an idea lacks
merit, but because it might turn out to be
workable, which would threaten the repu¬
tations of many people whose opinions
conflict with it. Some people may even lose
their jobs.”

The man who said this is an eminent
physicist who started devising equipment to
detect gravity waves 30 years ago. Despite
his secure tenure and respected status, he
still wouldn’t let me quote him by name,
because he suffered in the past when he
promoted radical concepts of his own.

Bob Park is a physics professor at the
University of Maryland, When he's pressed
to say something about Podkletnov's work,
he comments: “Well, we know that we
can create shields for other fields, such
as electromagnetic fields; so in that sense
I suppose that a gravity shield does not
violate any physical laws. Still, most scien¬
tists would be reluctant to conclude any¬

thing publicly from this” Ironically, Park
has made a name for himself by debunking
“fringe” science in a weekly column for
the American Physical Society 's Web page.

If scientists are reluctant to “conclude
anything publicly” it's partly because they
know they may be stigmatized by critics
such as Park.

Of course, reflexive conservatism isn't
the whole story. Many physicists are skep¬
tical about gravity shielding because they
believe that it conflicts with Einstein’s gen-
eral theory of relativity. According to George
Smoot, a renowned professor of physics at
UC Berkeley who collaborated on an essay
that won a Gravity Research Foundation
award, “If gravity shielding is going to be
consistent with Einstein’s general theory,
you would need tremendous amounts of
mass and energy. It's far beyond the tech¬
nology we have today”

On the other hand, theories developed by
Giovanni Modanese, Ning Li, and Douglas

Torr portray a superconductor as a giant
“quantum object” which might be exempt
from Smoot's criticism, since Einstein’s
general theory has nothing to say about
quantum effects. As Smoot himself admits,
“The general theory is widely revered
because Einstein wrote it, and it happens
to be very beautiful. But the general theory
is not entirely compatible with quantum
mechanics, and sooner or later it will have
to be modified ”

lie also says that Lhe nonlinear spin of
gravity particles - “gravitons” - makes cal¬
culations extremely difficult, “When you
add a spinning disc,” he says, “the equations
become impossible to solve ”

This means that gravity shielding cannot
be disproved mathematically. Even Bob
Park, the resident skeptic, shies away from
describing it as “impossible” because “there
have been things that we thought were
impossible, which actually came to pass ”
Gregor}’ Beuford, a professor of physics at
UC Irvine who also writes science fiction,
echoes this and takes it a step further.
“There’s nothing impossible about gravity
shielding ” he says. “It just requires a field
theory that we don’t have yet. Anyone who
says it’s inconceivable is suffering from a
lack of imagination,”

When I first started reading about gravity
modification, 1 was skeptical. Most likely,

1 thought, Podkletnov’s experimental pro¬
cedures were flawTed.

A year later. I'm not so sure. Having ques¬
tioned him in detail for several hours, I
believe that he did his work in a careful,
responsible fashion. I'm no longer willing
to write him off as an eccentric suffering
from wishful thinking. I believe he observed
something - although the exact nature of it
remains unclear.

And so, frustratingly, there's no conclusive
ending to this long, strange story - at least
until someone provides independent verifi¬
cation. In the meantime, there’s only one
thing we can do:

Wait. ■ ■ ■

Thanks to John Cramer for factual orien¬
tation and Robert Becker for theoretical
background. Pete Skeggs participated in
my visit to NASA and offered extremely
generous help .

“There’s nothing impossible about gravity shielding,”

says a professor of physics. “Anyone who says it’s inconceivable

is suffering from a lack of imagination

WIRED MUCH 1998

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COM Pll

MENTOR

roponte

Message: 56
Date: 03.1 .98

From: < nlchoiasd media, mit.edu>
To: <lr@wjred.com>

Subject:

Toys of Tomorrow

Why would Professor Michael
Hawley swallow a computer?
Because he plays. He plays the piano.
He plays hockey. He plays with ideas.
In fact he plays with notions like
running the Boston Marathon with
a radio transmitter pill inside his
stomach, from which his core body
temperature measurements would
be broadcast to a ny and all media
willing to listen (Ut.www.medla.mit
. edu/pio/marathonman/) .

The wild, the absurd, the seem¬
ingly crazy: this kind of thinking
is where new ideas come from. In

killjoys insist, is something compa¬
nies cannot afford, in terms of either
money or image, Thus the duty of
academic institutions to be, among
other things, more playful.

This sounds simple, but is so true:
When people play, they have their
best ideas, and they make their best
connections with their best friends.
In playing a game, the learning and
exercise come for free. Playing pro¬
duces some of the most special
times and most valuable lessons in
life. Still, many teachers and parents
consider the classroom and the

Toys may be the fastest moving -
and evolving - vehicles on the infobahn.

The challenge: melt a Cray
down into a Crayola.

corporate parlance it's called "think¬
ing out of the box." At the MIT Media
Lab, it's business as usual. The people
capable of such playful thought carry
forward their childish qualities and
childhood dreams, applying them
in areas where most of us get stuck,
victims of our adult seriousness.
Staying a child isn't easy. But a con¬
tinuous stream of new toys helps.

"You get paid for this?"

Many people accuse the MIT Media
Lab of being a giant playpen. Well,
they're right. It is a digital wonder¬
land overflowing with outrageous
toys: all imaginable sorts of comput¬
ers and interface paraphernalia.

Play, however, is a pretty serious
business in the hands of students
and professors like Hawley - It's 24
hours a day, seven days a week. And
some profound results, both scholarly
and commercial, come out of this
play. Of course, a few naysayers forget
that the world has a lot more money
than good ideas. Such behavior, the

playground to be worlds apart. But
are they?

When a young child plays with
a toy, the interaction can be magic.
Toys unlock that magic - part in the
toy and part in the child's head. Toys
are the medium and the catalyst of
play. Recognizing the power of play,
Hawley and company are fundamen¬
tally rethinking toys, exploring the
convergence of digital technology
and the toys of tomorrow - another
case where bits and atoms meet.
Computers have changed almost all
forms of work. And, since play is the
work of children, it is time to revisit
the tools of their trade.

TNT: toy networking
technologies

The Internet is largely composed
of desktop computers, assembled
like the world's biggest pile of Tinker-
toys. These days, many people talk
of extending the network beyond
desks and into ail sorts of appliances,
large and small. There is no question

that appliances like refrigerators
or doorknobs should be networked.
But what might happen if toys were
networked, too? If each Mickey Mouse
and Barbie had an IP address, their
population would exceed that of a
small, well-connected country.

Every year, 75 percent of all toys
are new, meaning newly designed
that year. The toy Industry lives
and dies on invention. Toys gush
into homes every Christmas and
Hanukkah, every birthday, and lots
of other days besides. This tremen¬
dous churn rate means that toys are
well matched to the pace of change
in the digital world. You can and
should put some form of computing
in a refrigerator, but a new fridge
enters the house only once every
20 years. With their far faster turn¬
over, toys may be the fastest moving
and fastest evolving vehicles on the
infobahn.

Toys of tomorrow will be net¬
worked. Tod ay, they rarely intercom¬
municate, There Is no MIDI for toys,
no Internet link. Once tomorrow's
powerful networks, simulators,
and synthesizers are commonly
interconnected through toys, a next
generation of exquisite musical toys
- a wonderful idea to begin with -
will emerge. A toy piano that sounds
like a Stein way. A baby rattle that
conducts a symphony. Blocks that
build a melody. Shoes that carry a
tune (think karaoke for your feet).
Every toy a link In a worldwide
toy box.

And every toy must be inexpen¬
sive. Today's typical toy costs about
US$20, which means it wholesales for
$14, and must be built for about $5,
Forget the $1,000 computer or the
$200 set-top box - invent a $5 com¬
puter that doesn't look or act like
a computer That's a grand challenge
for the digital industries: melt a Cray
down into a Crayola.

The real toy story

Today, a conservative computer indus¬
try still seems determined to push
laptops into the hands of fat-fingered
50-year-olds, with "Net PCs" just an
infrared click away from tomorrow's
couch potatoes.

Surely we can do more than that.
Bur how?

Hawley and others at MIT have
been making new friends around the
world to help invent toys.Their new
business partners these days include
Lego, Disney, Mattel, Hasbro, Bandai,
Toys "R" Us, and others. Their other
playmates are computer, communica-
tio ns, an d ente rtai n m e nt com pa n i e s
like Intel, Motorola, Deutsche Tele¬
kom, Nickelodeon, and, believe it or
not, the International Olympic Com¬
mittee. Never before have the world's
leading toy makers, technology com¬
panies, and sports organizations col¬
laborated in such a way - which is
just terrific, because the new world
of digital toys won't be invented by
any one group.

Nobody is quite sure what will
turn up on this new road to invention.
The program just started Stay tuned.
But one thing is dear: Toys of tomor¬
row will carry some of the most
awesome and inspiring technology
humankind has yet created and place
it in the hands of children. Where
it belongs.

Think of it this way. Being "wired"
does not mean becoming 'computer
literate" any more than driving an
automobile requires becoming 'com¬
bustion literate "The power of toys is
that they reach back to and shape the
earliest years in our lives. One day, our
grandchildren will naturally assume
that teddy bears tell great stories,
baseballs know where they are, and
toy cars drive themselves with iner¬
tial guidance. Lucky them. ■ m m

Next: HJ- 1 1

WIRED MARCH 1998

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